Phantom has made $57 million so far. It cost $70 million to make and the marketing costs are unknown- let's say $30 million for the sake of easy math. So going by the formula that a movie needs to make back twice its costs to break even,
Phantom has $143 million to go.
Let's compare that again to
Alexander- that movie cost $155 million and had about $40 million in marketing costs. So far it's made $79 million worldwide. It needs to make $311 million to make back its costs.
Of course, the other big factor in that comparison is that
Alexander has been out since November 24 and spread to as many as 2,445 theaters in its widest release.
Phantom has been out only since December 22 and spread to 622 theaters.
So which is the bigger flop? And if it was that easy for me to find a bigger flop from 2004, how the heck can we call
Phantom the biggest flop of all time?
Psychology 101- people will bend the facts to make them fit into their worldview. People hate
Phantom and want it to flop, so by golly, when they see a headline (even from a notoriously inaccurate source like IMDB) that says
Phantom is a flop, they'll leap all over it. And numbers can be made to lie, too, especially when facts about them are taken as truisms with no analysis or comparison.
Like I've said way too many times, I hate
Phantom. But the title of this thread is utterly ridiculous.
Updated On: 1/9/05 at 03:53 PM
