How much money does a movie have to make in order for it to be a flop, modest hit, and a huge hit?

Answer 1

Depends on a number of factors:

1. Intended audience; a small documentary would be considered a huge hit if a few ten thousand viewed it but a multimillion dollar blockbuster would need a millions to be considered a hit.

2. Break-even cost; this is just basic math, the more money it takes to make a movie the more viewers it will need to be a hit, the biggest flops are the multimillion dollar blockbusters that don't even make back their production costs.

3. Location; in the US a major movie needs millions of viewers to be a hit, but in Canada get a few ten thousand and its a bestseller.

Basically you need to be more specific in what type of movie you mean, but a general guideline would be to figure out how much it took to make a movie (yahoo movies usually gives production cost for example) and then divide that by how much the movie has made, then you can figure out how much is made per dollar spent, obviously if this is a negative number you are in trouble, I would say double your cost and you might have a moderate success, if you are making many times the cost then you might have a hit.

Answer 2

For any movie to be described as a flop I think it has to make less money then it cost to make. A flop in the making right now appears to be Grindhouse. Having debuted at the No 4 spot and dropped this weekend to No 10. A modest hit I think could be seen as any movie that makes back the cost of his production plus a little bit extra. Say 20 Million to make and earned 40 million at the box office. A huge hit becomes obvious at this point, any movie that not only makes back the money it cost to make but doubles or even triples it. Examples of that can be the LoTR movies, Titanic..even the Blair Witch Project (which for a very long time saw the highest profit to cost ratio for any movie in history) So as you can see movies can sometimes be a virtual money machine and other times and they can bring ruin