A product's value is never just a matter of "Put X in and get Y out," especially when inducing such immeasurable variables as "marketing" into the equation If that were the case, then one could figure-finagle such that everything is sold for a loss. Because everything is ultimately about marketing. But it's not so much the goods that are being sold as the service.
Take cars for example. Most make/models never recoup their production costs; many fail to even pay for the R&D. Manufactures over produce to the point where there are massive lots filled with seemingly endless boundaries of (otherwise brand new) unsold cars. Granted, the production cost of each individual car isn't
that much, relatively speaking, but when the cost of all of them is added together, it becomes a rather significant scab on the model's annual take.
Yet car commercials are just about the most frequent and ubiquitous form advertising around. I read somewhere once that the combined cost all the major car companies spend on advertising could pay for one car for each American family.
The thing is, you might see F-150, Prius, and Beetle commercials, but they aren't
really selling the cars. They're selling Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen.
Consumer electronics works much the same way. The electronics manufactures know that if they sold their refrigerators, microwave ovens, and color TVs at prices necessary to get their money back in a reasonable amount of time, they'd have to price those things much higher than what is viably marketable. Video game consoles are notorious for this.
Sony doesn't put out Playstation commercials just to sell Playstations. It does it more to sell Sony. (Not that its done a very good job of this lately.
) In fact, in many of these commercials the Sony logo appears as much--if not more--than the Playstation logo.
Companies do this to promote consumer happiness and confidence. Consumer happiness and confidence translates into shareholder happiness and confidence.
It's no different with movies. The Paramount logo appears in the STiD trailer just as much as the
Star Trek logo. The trailer isn't jus their to tell people theirs a new Trek movie coming out. It's there to ensure people Paramount--and in turn, Viacom--is still relevant. Stocks go up. (Ideally, of course.)
Therefore, it's not very accurate to put Star Trek's marketing costs solely on Star Trek. It's money that Paramount had already set aside for advertising as was going to spend anyway. They budget their estimated marketing costs annually and allocate accordingly. In some years Star Trek has seen a bigger piece of that pie. In some years not.
So saying that a film has to make at least twice its budget to "pay for advertising" is nonsense.
