What the Sony hack told us about studio expectations

It appears we are some lucky people. After years and years of bad movies, long waits and poor acting we are finally in what is going to be called the "Golden Age" of comic book movies. The true renaissance of creation for what we all really do love. This past year has been exception for both quality and box office returns. Not only has the quality been generally higher, we had a completely unknown property claim (and maybe hold) the top domestic spot and we have one franchise nearly double their best previous outing. But there is a wolf in the henhouse no one sees and it appears the recent Sony hack has exposed it. Are studio expectations being met? And is the return on investment worth their while? Let’s elaborate a little bit more. Follow me for a bit if your dont mind...
 
This year for Comic Book movies we saw Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Xmen: Days of Future Past, Amazing Spiderman 2, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles and Big Hero Six. Personally I really like 5 out of 6 and they all appeared to do well at the box office. 

Each movies production budget, domestic profit and international profit is outline below.  


   
The above figures do not include the marketing budgets for each project. Marketing budgets are mysterious and highly debated subject here on this site. Fairly prominent people in the movie news scene (i.e. Those that do this and get paid for it..) have claimed that some of these budgets were 100-150m for some films over the past year. We have ZERO concrete data on this and hopefully as these Sony leaks appear we will know more. This is an important caveat. This takes directly from the profitability of the film. Profit is the name of the game.  And remember, profits are derived from the box office (studio usually gets 50% of that figure) plus extras like merch, dvd, and other goodies. 
 
We do have some concrete data on some details about profitability and Sony’s productions. During the release of Sony info by hackers, The Hollywood reporter ran a story about the profitability figures for such 2013 movies as 'This Is the End,' 'Grown Ups 2,' 'Captain Phillips' and 'American Hustle'. Although the profitability of these films was interesting that was not the curious part of the article.  Let’s just quote the article:
 
The non-encrypted document, which was prepared by SPE’s senior VP of finance and controller Curtis Crider, offered up numbers rarely discussed outside of studio board rooms. “Currently, approximately $1B in production spending can be expected to deliver $500M-$600M in profits,” the letter says. “Through his continued focus on financial discipline, Doug hopes to improve that ratio to a point where $800-$900M in production spending delivers $500-$600M in profits.”
 
Wait..what? 1b investing to generate 500-600m profit?!? Well, isn’t that special? So if we understand properly that Sony is looking for more than 50 cents on every dollar invested RETURNED as profit. Let’s look at Amazing Spiderman 2 again. It was reported by Deadline that the movie cost 255m(UPDATE: IMDB has this at 230m, WIkipedia at 200m so looks like it varies) to make and marketing was AT LEAST 150m since we all remember the onslaught of trailers and materials. Even if we reduce the budget down to a reasonable 200m we are still left with almost 700m to get into the realm of profitability. Sony in the best made about 10-15m in profit plus DVD sales. 350m in with 15m out is about 4 cents on the dollar profit for investment. Not even close to the expectations places on the films mentioned above in the leaked documents. Compared with say GoTG with 170m in budget and probably 100m in marketing meaning the movie returned about 230m in profit so far on a 170m investment.  It also appears that BH6 may actually be a 'bust' also when the smoke clears from the theaters, although the nature of kids movies means higher toy/dvd sales. Additionally, compare that 1b of current total production budget to the 255m ASM2 budget. That movie use almost 1/4 of the overall available funds slotted for studio production.
   
As more data and information becomes available because of the Sony hacking incident I am sure we will find out some exact details on Amazing Spiderman (1&2) production, costs, feedback and quality/story problems but this is a bigger issue. This begs the question of what others studios’ expect to get in returns at the executive level. Well it appears that 50-60% of production budget IN PROFIT is the goal.  I would imagine numbers are consistently close to satisfy investors from other studios such as Fox, Disney and Warner Brothers. Are we reaching out budgetary limits? Will saturation cause these numbers to dip more into a zone of weak profitability causing their demise??  Looking at the other franchises and comparing the numbers we can see what the future may hold for some studio plans. 
Sound off below!