The Big Reasons 'Blade Runner 2049' And 'Ghostbusters' Both Bombed
In the final tally, Blade Runner 2049 will earn around $250 million worldwide on a $150m budget. That's what we used to call "a disappointment in relation to cost." As I've noted before, a $250m worldwide gross for a long, R-rated, adult-skewing, relatively dry and action-lite sci-fi tone poem is actually pretty decent on its face. The Ryan Gosling/Harrison Ford sci-fi sequel grossed more worldwide than, for example, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Jupiter Ascending and The Lone Ranger. Oh, Alcon Entertainment and Sony will lose money for sure, and Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. (the domestic distributor) took it a little bit on the chin, but this isn't Town and Country or Pluto Nash.
The movie that said the Denis Villeneuve-directed sequel most reminds me of, in more ways than one, is last year's female-led Ghostbusters remake.
That Sony release, helmed by Paul Feig and starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones, was a major disappointment last in July of 2016, specifically in relation to cost. The film cost a whopping $144 million to produce, and it made only $229m worldwide. While the film did a decent $128m domestic, it flatlined overseas where the Ghostbusters IP isn't necessarily iconic. It didn't even play in China, due to their issues concerning paranormal and supernatural elements so you can make the case that had it played in China it would have equaled/surpassed the $250m+ Blade Runner 2049 cume.
Not even accounting for the ridiculous (and perhaps prescient) cultural controversy over sexist men and boys up-in-arms over the film's female cast, Ghostbusters has a few things in common with Blade Runner 2049. In both cases, the online social media bubble vastly overestimated the general populace interest in the respective 1980's sci-fi franchises. Endless web chatter did not (relatively speaking) translate into ticket sales. In both cases, a successful director of polished, mainstream, adult-skewing studio movies got tripped up by the franchise/IP machine.
This applies artistically more to Ghostbusters than Blade Runner 2049, as no matter my issues with the latter it is clearly the movie its filmmakers intended. Ghostbusters was caught in a push-pull between offering Feig's usually R-rated sense of humor yet also delivering a theatrical cut that was kid-friendly and played as a tentpole-ish spectacle. The cast saved the day, although (like Batman v Superman) the extended version (with a snarkier tone and more fleshed out character work) is a vastly superior film.
In both cases, esteemed directors of successful mid-budget original studio pictures ended up with budgets so high that disaster was all-but-inevitable.
I've gone on record arguing many times that the core issue with Blade Runner 2049, financially speaking, is that it cost $150 million (after rebates and what-have-you) to produce. This was a 35-years later sequel to a movie that bombed way back in 1982, and it was so expensive that it essentially had to play like a cultural event. You don't budget a Blade Runner sequel so that it has to perform like a Star Wars sequel. And I would argue the same for Ghostbusters. Yes, some of that budget was about development costs of prior versions and producers who got a paycheck merely by being somewhat involved with the IP (which is how a movie like Rings ends up costing $25m), but $144m was still an insane figure for what is essentially a comedy.
At a cost of $144 million, after rebates and what-have-you, Ghostbusters could have been director Paul Feig and star Melissa McCarthy's biggest movie ever and still been a disappointment. Okay, so that $229m puts it fourth out of Feig's five releases in terms of worldwide gross (right under Spy and below The Heat and Bridesmaids), but even a total above the $288m cume of Bridesmaids (and/or the original Ghostbusters) would have been underwhelming at that cost. For Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049's $250m cume is indeed his biggest global hit ever. But at that budget, it's a loss instead of a win.
Both directors, who have been quite successful at offering mid-budget, star-driven adult dramas (Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival) or mid-budget, star-driven adult comedies (Bridesmaids, The Heat, Spy) have a black mark on their record because the would-be safety of the IP backfired. Even accounting for inflation and an expanded overseas marketplace, both films essentially had to be exceptionally more successful than their predecessors just to break even.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2017/11/08/box-office-yes-blade-runner-2049-was-this-years-ghostbusters/