My buddies and I are having an argument about director Martin Scorsese and which of his films has been the biggest flop. I say it was the confusing horror film “Shutter Island” from 2010, but my friend says that film was profitable. How can I find out how much money the movie earned?
First off, you have good taste in movies, even if inadvertent. I think that Shutter Island is a great, moody horror film with some really interesting ideas about fear, delusions and mental illness. Definitely worth watching. Haven’t heard of it? Here’s a one line synopsis: “In 1954, a U.S. Marshal (Leonardo DiCaprio) investigates the disappearance of a murderer who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane.” The gloomy hospital is located on its own tiny island, hence the film title.
With the Internet at your fingertips, you can also learn quite a bit about a movie’s critical and public reception as well as a lot about its box office and overall earnings. Check Rotten Tomatoes, for example, and you’ll learn that Shutter Island earns a middling 68% aggregate critic rating and a somewhat better 76% rating from the film-going public. I’m a big fan of the Internet Movie Database which has its own scoring system and on IMDb the film earns an 8.1 from moviegoers, while they also reference a metascore of 63%, even lower than Rotten Tomatoes.
While you’re on the IMDb page, you can actually scroll down to the section labeled “Box Office” and learn this:
IMDb is only concerned with theatrical figures, but you can see that in the USA alone, gross revenue was okay at $128 million against an estimated budget of $80 million. Add worldwide and it made just shy of $300 million, which seems pretty good. Hollywood has its own accounting systems, however, and these budget numbers sometimes skip over post-production marketing costs, so it’s smart to dig a bit deeper.
One strategy you can use is to check the trade publications for the movie industry for financial and box office results. Using a smart Google search, a quick search for “shutter island (financial|box office|results) site:variety.com” yields a number of interesting articles, though not much on long-term box office or overall sales. A better site to check is the-numbers, where a quick look for Shutter Island yields:
This adds the impressive figure of $35 million in additional revenue just from home market sales. This still doesn’t count when companies like HBO paid for first rights to air to the home audience, but if we add up the $299 million and the $35.4 million, that’s a total revenue of $334.4 million against an $80 million production budget.
Profitable? Seems like it. Is Shutter Island the least profitable of all of Martin Scorsese’s films, however? To really ascertain that I think you’d need to do this sort of research for each of the 61 films he’s directed. Which might prove quite a bit of work! Then again, you can just go to his first feature length film, 1967’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door which earned a cumulative worldwide gross of $16,085 against a budget of $75,000. One doubts that its DVD earnings made up for that loss, somehow.
Meanwhile, let’s end on a high note! Here’s the original theatrical trailer for Shutter Island:
Hope that gives you the tools you’ll need to help settle your bet! But now you need to go re-watch the film too, don’t you?