With all due respect, it made its money back some time ago. The budget was $190,000,000. So the profit so far has been $257,000,000.
There are dozens of pages in this thread explaining how that the ticket revenue at the theater does not just all magically get delivered to the movie studios any more than every time you buy a pair of shoes at Foot Locker that all the money goes to Nike.
There are ALSO dozens of pages in this thread where people explain how movie studios artificially inflate production budget figures as well. (IE Claim the film cost way more to make than it actually did.)
Yes, that's great but its not really relevant with my point. My point was very simply that you cannot say Movie X's budget (which you agree is an unreliable number) was $100, the ticket sales were $250 and thus the movie made $150. A pretty simplistic, naive and inaccurate statement and easily shown to be false.
In the end, the simple fact is that STiD made $457+ million worldwide to date. If that's not enough to earn a tidy profit in itself - then it's amazing how all these 'poor money loosing studios' in Hollywood survive.
The public's fascination with "box office numbers" is cute but misguided. For the first 6 months the only movie revenue is theater ticket sales. STID will be lucky to make up their P&A (Prints and Advertising) costs with this revenue. Plus ticket sales are only somewhere in the range of 20-30% of a movie's total revenue. Currently STID has probably not even dented its Production budget.
30-50% of a movie's revenue will be DVD rental, DVD sales and Pay-per-view. The last big portion will be the television licensing fees which is almost pure profit producing revenue due to the major studios incestuous relationships with networks these days.
In addition a franchise like Star Trek can make more from merchandising and other licensing agreements than your typical Hollywood movie do to books, toys, comics, etc.
Also, I am not talking about the creative accounting done by the movie studios where movies like Forrest Gump, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter, etc, have never made a profit. That's just an example of the big Hollywood Studios ripping off actors, writers, directors, etc, and avoiding paying any taxes. Obviously the people who are important are making money hand over fist. That kind of BS accounting, however, is a discussion in itself.
STID might never be listed as making an official profit but a lot of people will make a lot of money and that will lead to a sequel which is all people around here really care about.
