#summer flops

Much has been said about the glut of blockbuster flops that have plagued the movie business this summer, but a new report suggests that the cost to the movie business could have been much worse than previously thought.

Business site Bloomberg has set the loss figure at nearly $1 billion.

Using figures and projections from movie industry site The Numbers, it blames a handful of larger budget movies failing, rather than lots of smaller budget movies not bringing in the crowds.

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In all, the top 10 biggest losers have lost $915.6 million (£684 million), a deficit hugely over last year’s, which came in at $546.3 million (£408 million).

Paramount suffered heavily, with ‘Ben-Hur’ topping top 10 chart of the biggest losses (around $120 million), with the surprise failure of ‘Star Trek Beyond’ ($75 million) and the ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ sequel ($65 million) also featuring.

The biggest losers also included Steve Spielberg’s ‘The BFG’ ($115 million), ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ ($90 million), ‘Kubo And The Two Strings’ ($80 million), ‘Pete’s Dragon’ ($70 million) and the rebooted ‘Ghostbusters’ ($58 million).

One analyst, Doug Creutz of Cowen & Co., told Bloomberg: “Overall it was pretty awful. We have been talking about the increasingly bad ecosystem that we see theatrically and I think it definitely played out this summer.”

Despite having three movies in the top 10 chart of biggest losses (‘The BFG’, ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ and ‘Pete’s Dragon’), Disney still had a massive summer of profit ($521 million), thanks to the roaring successes of ‘Finding Dory’ and ‘Captain America: Civil War’, the two movies with the biggest profits of the year.

Warner Bros has also had a solid summer, with ‘Suicide Squad’, ‘The Conjuring 2’, ‘Central Intelligence’, ‘Me Before You’ and the low-budget, high-profit horror ‘Lights Out’ all featuring in the top 10 biggest movies.

Universal’s ‘The Secret Life of Pets’ was also a huge hit, with approximated profits of nearly $375 million.

Some studios have questioned the figures, a rep for Sony calling the losses for ‘Ghostbusters’ ‘seriously flawed’, while another at Warners disputed supposed $66.7 million projected losses for the movie ‘War Dogs’.

However, the failure of several of this summer’s most expensive movies certainly shows a downward trend.

“People aren’t going to the box office as much as they used to,” Creutz added. “The only way out of this problem for Hollywood is fewer studios, and that ain’t going to happen.”