Worldwide Grosses...

[ratchet]

I am wondering - movies that don't do well domestically but still do well overseas are still considered flops... why is that?

Movies like POtC 4, Die Hard 5, Battleship did terribly here (and deservingly so as they were all horrible) but made 300 mil worldwide. So, why are they still considered flops? Is it that they did not make as much as they were projected to make?

[Tetragrammaton]

I do not think it really has much to do where the money is made, domestic or internationally as long as the movie is profitable. Generally, for a movie to be profitable it needs to earn twice its production budget. This covers the split between the theaters and promotional costs.

If we look at Battleship while it did make $300M worldwide we also see that it had a relatively huge production budget of $209M. Using our simplified equation for profitability we see that it falls far short of $418M so it hasn't made the studio any money.

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=battleship.htm

Die Hard 5 should by this logic be considered profitable seeing as how it had a production budget of only $92M. I think it may just have fallen short of expectations.

[Vracula]

Because studios are greedy , we are seeing the same thing with the gaming industry now,all companies are expecting their games to sell like call of duty.

[ratchet]

But seriously - with Battleship - was Peter Burg TRYING to be a poor man's Michael Bay?