I'm excited and proud and pissed off, because the box office numbers for Iron Lung are impressive, but also disingenuous.
Gross Income is not the same as Profit.
Sam Raimi's Send Help, going into day 4, sits at 20mil, which is a net negative, 50% behind its 40mil budget.
Avatar, touted as the highest profiting film of all time, made a 237% net profit over its entire run.
The final Hxrry Pxtter movie made a 360% net profit.
Mark Fischbach's Iron Lung has turned a 570% net profit. In three days.
3mil-18mil isn't impressive on its face, next to a $500mil film making $2bn. Raw numbers are raw numbers. but for return on investment, Iron Lung is not only running with the biggest studios in the world -- it's crushing them.
To put it in simple terms, all theatrical releases have to make back AT LEAST twice what they cost to make. I say "at least," because most theatrical movies spend a fuckton on advertising, and several of them spend even more on merchandising.
Iron Lung had basically NO advertising, and a negligible amount of merchandising. For a normal movie, that means that nobody goes to see the movie because they've never heard of it, and the movie can't cover any of the lost box office revenue with merch sales (you CAN have a box office bomb recover its budget with merch sales).
A theatrical release earning back its budget and then some on nothing but word of mouth and a loyal, pre-established fanbase is unprecedented. It doesn't happen. Ever.
THAT'S why Hollywood is pissed. Because to executives, a puny internet personality self-funding a passion project with basically no advertising or merch shouldn't happen. To them, it defies all logic. They've been putting billions upon billions of dollars into advertising, merchandising, celebrity casting, huge sets, expensive CGI, and so much more; and then this "nobody" comes along and succeeds with none of that.
This is true, and it's also worth mentioning that this also defies the traditional model of distribution for movies.
Mark tried to get the movie distributed through traditional means, but got fucked over at every turn. Nobody wanted to distribute this movie. Distributors like to be able to control what is and isn't in theaters. It gives them more confidence in their bottom line and projections for how many people are going to see their movie.
This movie was distributed by the fans to over 4,000 theaters worldwide, had a domestic release around the same size as its biggest competitor that week, and made a significant profit while retaining a 50/50 split with theaters, so the theaters are making more off of that ticket than for a typical movie.
Disney probably doesn't care that Iron Lung made 20 million dollars, plenty of movies do that. They care that seemingly anyone can put a movie into theaters the exact same way they can.
