Top Movie Studios Of 2008

One of the biggest film industry surprises in 2008 was The Dark Knight (a widely revered film by both critics and fans) breaking the billion-dollar mark after about 30 weeks in theaters. Since Warner Bros. made a killing off the superhero in 2008, I was interested to know how that company, along with several others, made out for the year. The following are some numbers to make your head spin that calculate how much money the top 10 production companies grossed last year.
The entire film industry grossed $9.63 billion in 2008, with nearly half of that going to Warner Bros., Paramount and Sony/Columbia.
Thanks mostly in part to The Dark Knight, Warner Bros. grossed $1.767 billion, or 18.4 percent of the market share. Paramount was close behind with $1.577 billion (16.4 percent) and Sony/Columbia rounded out the top three grossing $1.267 billion (13.2 percent).
Universal — which is owned by NBC — grossed 11 percent of the market share, receiving 1.054 billion. The last two companies to receive more than a billion each were 20th Century Fox ($1.014 billion) and Buena Vista ($1.011 billion). Both grossed approximately 10.5 percent of the market share.
Rounding out the top 10 were Lionsgate ($436 million, 4.5 percent), Summit Entertainment ($226 million, 2.4 percent), Fox Searchlight (214 million, 2.2 percent) and MGM/UA (160 million, 1.7 percent).
All of this is great, but what does it really mean? Well, if you look at each production company’s slate of movies released, studios like Lionsgate, 20th Century Fox and MGM/UA don’t really come off as well as they might originally have looked. Keep in mind that the rule of thumb for movie making is a film has to gross approximately twice its budget to break even, but that is combining both domestic and international box office money. So although production companies might make more than a billion dollars in one year, their profits don’t necessarily show that they had a great year.
Take Lionsgate for example. It came in as the seventh highest grossing company earning $436 million, but it also released 19 films in 2008. Paramount tracked 17 movies in 2008 — three of which were released in 2007 and the gross from those films were taken from a certain amount of weeks after its initial release — and made nearly four times as much money. Per film, Lionsgate made $22.95 million for 2008. Paramount grossed approximately $92.76 million in the same amount of time.
Lionsgate wasn’t the lowest performing movie studio in 2008, however, MGM/UA earned somewhere between $9-13 million per picture.
As daunting as these figures are, I’m not even taking into account what the budgets for each film were, so really Lionsgate and MGM/UA might have made movies on shoestring budgets while Paramount lost money on every single one of its movies because of blockbuster budgets that didn’t ever pay off, but that is unlikely.
Maybe one of these days I’ll do the extra work and figure out exactly who was the big winner for 2008, but since I’m exhausted after all of this I’m just going to pretend that since The Dark Knight kicked butt both monetarily and literally this past year, Warner Bros. is the big winner. Warner Bros. wins. Now let’s go down to the Dresden and be all happy that some girl is wearing a backpack.