According to the studios, 2005 was a poor year for the worldwide box office. Coming top of the pile however, was Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, which took a shade under £500 million, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with just under £450 million. It's hardly surprising that those films did well considering they belong to the two most successful film series of all time. However, what of the rest?

The third highest grossing film was Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, with a fraction more than £325 million, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Madagascar both earned just over £300 million.

At this point you're probably wondering what my point is, since these films seem to have made a remarkable amount of money. However, considering the amount spent on some of these films, their profit margins are utterly marginal. War of the Worlds has taken roughly two and a half times its production and marketing costs. Peter Jackson's King Kong is currently slipping down the US box office having only just managed to cover its massive £175+ million production, marketing and advertising costs. When you remember this is the latest film from the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and has been praised by critics around the world, for it to struggle to make such a paltry total is somewhat unusual.

The worldwide top 25 for 2005 is filled with films which grossed only double their costs Fantastic Four , Flightplan and Robots to name but a few. Coming even further down are films which barely made a profit, as well as the aforementioned King Kong, Kingdom of Heaven and The Island both just about managed to cover their losses. But this is the top 25 grossing films of the year and it's an amazing situation that films grossing such huge amounts of money are barely turning a profit.

If we look back to before 2001 (no Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings) the picture is very different. The worldwide figures for the top grossing films are much the same as they are now. There are a couple of films every year which blow the competition away - Titanic in 1997, before that Independence Day in 1996, and going back to 1993, Jurassic Park. Also, below these, when you adjust the rest of the box office for inflation, the figures are very similar to 2005. There are 5-10 films each year earning around £150-200 million, then about another 5-10 earning around £75-150 million, about the same as we have now. However, what has changed is the amount that these films cost to make - Titanic had half the budget of King Kong.

So how does this relate to my title of "Too Many Blockbusters?". Well, the studios say that it's been a bad year at the box office because a lot of films have been losing money. However, if you look at the figures I have presented, the reason for this isn't because people aren't going to the cinema anymore, it's because the market is actually saturated - people just aren't prepared to spend any more money than they do already on going to the cinema, unless something utterly astonishing is produced. Added to this is the fact that the budgets of most blockbuster films have doubled over the last 10 years or so, so it's no wonder that the studios are earning less money. It used to be the case that a massive film could earn 8 or 10 times its production costs, but now they are lucky triple them.

The answer is simple, if studios want to make more money they have to concentrate on less expensive films. Cinema ticket prices are starting to get ridiculous and people are not going to spend £5-10 on a ticket unless it's actually something they want to see, so churning out endless blockbusters is not the answer. The fact is that there used to be a handful of expensive films which took the box office by storm every year, now there are just too many of them competing for essentially the same money. Therefore, I wonder if 2006 will see a decline in the number of massively expensive films, and more prudence from film studios.

© David Mercier
Discuss films and features on the FilmJudge Blog