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The scary thought here is that an argument could be made that the three films above could be described as winners if we simply compare global take to production budget, an inaccurate but usually accepted method for determining box office winners and losers. This is how reliant the movie industry has become on international revenue.

Given the above, let’s just focus on domestic performances relative to budgets for other high profile releases. Sex and the City 2, a victory lap for Warner Bros. and a film that Reagen Sulewski hilariously designated as The Skankquel, cost $95 million to produce and made $95.3 million domestically. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time cost $200 million to produce while earning a pathetic $90.8 million domestically. The A-Team had a $110 million production budget yet earned only $77.2 million. My wife's beloved Scott Pilgrim vs. the World had a budget of $85 million (before tax credits) yet earned only $31.6 million. The Last Airbender cost $150 million while grossing $131.8 million. Killers cost $75 million to create while grossing only $47.1 million. Marmaduke cost $50 million (I have no idea why) while earning a paltry $33.6 million. And the two biggest losers of the summer of 2010 (other than Prince of Persia) wipe all the rest out in this paragraph in terms of scale. Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore had a laughable production budget of $85 million while grossing a meager $43.6 million. And The Sorcerer’s Apprentice had a ridiculously reckless budget of $160 million against a domestic gross of $63.1 million.

Those are a lot of numbers to throw at you at once, so let’s summarize them. Let’s combine the domestic grosses as well as the production budgets of the disappointing high profile summer releases listed above. Robin Hood, Salt, Knight & Day, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Sex and the City 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, The A-Team, The Last Airbender, Killers, Marmaduke, Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice earned $914.3 million domestically. These dozen films cost $1.49 billion to produce. When we factor in international receipts, the picture isn’t quite as bleak, but that is a staggering statistic. A dozen films that earned less than a billion dollars domestically had production budgets of half a billion more than that.

In this day and age, there is an imperative for studios to carefully select the correct projects to greenlight. This is due to the unconscionable expense in producing a major studio release. A couple of these movies had production budgets in excess of the gross domestic product of some countries that have hosted Survivor. That’s how much capital is at risk here. When content creators fail to choose correctly, they have hedged their bets by building up the overseas theater industry to the point where they have a safety net.

Inevitably, North American exhibitors are the ones left holding the bag. Since they are entirely reliant upon movie distributors to have a product to sell, they are completely at the whim of movie makers. In the summer of 2010, this meant that they had largely empty auditoriums as people compared the escalating costs of movie tickets against the available product and made the only logical decision. For this reason, summer movie ticket sales were their lowest in over a decade with several overpriced productions failing completely.

The summer of 2011 is comic book movie focused almost to a point of fault. Here’s hoping these action films are more appealing to consumers than The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The A-Team and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time proved to be.

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