For the third installment of my series on the financial side of the film industry, I’m going to profitability and asking, “How do movies make no profit?” Hollywood has a bad reputation when it comes to financial transparency and openness. So, let’s take a closer look at the movie industry’s profitability.
The ‘Insider’ dataset contains information from insiders. A collection of 279 films for which I have inside financial data revealing the true costs and revenues during the span of the film’s existence. I went over the origins of this data in a previous essay, but for now, just know that it’s real-world, reliable data from people who work in Hollywood film financing.
The ‘Nash’ dataset is a set of information. Nash Information Services, LLC is the industry’s leading provider of ‘Comp Reports’ for movie business plans, and they’ve generously shared their internal profit and loss estimates for 2,819 films with us. They use a variety of sources to figure out how much money movies have made at each level of the film value chain. This information is used by producers, investors, and organisations to find successful films that are comparable to their own in order to make production and financial decisions.
‘Complete’ is a term used to describe a dataset. This includes every film released in the United States between 1990 and 2015 that has a budget number.
