Basically, the only modern studio consistently putting out stop motion animation movies, is Laika Studios. And yet, Laika has only had one financially successful movie, Coraline from 2009, while all their other movies have under performed.
However, Laika is currently led and owned by Travis Knight, son of Phil Knight, the owner of Nike. This has enabled Knight to continually bank roll Laika whenever they under perform, essentially making the entire stop motion animation film industry a nepo baby’s pet project.
That being said, this is actually a positive story, and reminiscent of how artists previously would be financially supported by wealthy benefactors.
I don’t know if motion animation is the same as other types of films, but for most of the industry you need box office sales to be double of the film budget for it to be considered profitable. Mainly due to marketing budgets and the huge percentage of profit that theaters get for the first few weeks of a film’s release.
This is backwards. Theaters actually get very little percentage early on in the release and only get more later. Most early profits go to the film studio/publisher. Or at least this was how it worked ore-Covid. Maybe it’s different now.
And to explain your comment a bit more, the production budget doesn’t include the very real costs of marketing, distribution, and any back-end royalties calculated from the gross. Plus generally speaking, the movie is financed by lenders and production companies that will need to be repaid with interest, too.
If you’ve got a $50 million movie and you spend $10 million on marketing/distribution and promised 10% of the gross to people, and the theaters are keeping 10% of the gross, getting a $75 million box office breaks even ($7.5 million to royalties, $7.5 million to theaters, $10 million to marketing/distribution). And that’s assuming nothing lost to interest/financing/inflation.
Side note: generally, theaters don’t get much in the first few weeks. It’s only when a movie shows longer than 3 weeks that the theater starts getting a bigger and bigger cut of the gross.
It’s pretty different from live action according to creators and producers, it’s such a small market and stop motion is so difficult to explain and get off the ground and promote that financial expectations are much more realistic.
You’re right that if a live-action movie costs $100 million to make grosses $180 million, the producers are upset, but that’s a greedy, ego-driven convention of the modern studio system, they are still making tens of millions of dollars before everything on the back end is added in.
The stop-motion world has a more realistic perspective on production and the artists love every single piece of art they create, so also making $40 million as evidence that their art style can succeed in mainstream culture is the cherry on top of any project that even gets to be fully produced.
It’s more that if a movie costs $100 million to make, it’s usually $100 million in marketing. So it would need to make $200 million to break even. Making $180 million means someone lost $20 million dollars, so I wouldn’t really call it greedy. If the movies are not making the money then they’d need to just start reducing scope or just hope someone will keep bank rolling them.