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DVD Sales Push Serenity Over The Top

Submitted by: Sevens

Newsarama is reporting that the combined sales of theater tickets and DVD sales has turned Serenity out of the red and into the black.

The total production costs for the Joss Whedon film was $39 million with a rumored advertising cost at approximately another $10 million making the total out of Universal's pocket at around $49 million. The total U.S. theater box office take was a disappointing $25 million with international theatrical sales fairing little better at $13 million leaving Universal in the red for a whopping $28 million when taking into account that studios receive around 55% of total ticket sales.

With that kind of red ink Universal and Whedon have been walking around with all their fingers crossed hoping that the DVD sales would at least allow them to break even and show the pic in the black, even if only marginally. And it looks like all the finger crossing has paid off as the latest DVD numbers look very encouraging. All DVD reports up to January 31st are in and it looks like over 2 million DVD's have been sold and VideoBusiness.com, an organization that tracks video rental information, announced that Serenity has made $9 million in DVD rentals alone.

The fact that Serenity has taken Universal out of the red and into the black is great news, but don't cheer too early. According to Universal execs it still may not be enough for them to wager on a costly sequel, even though Whedon brought this one in at $1 million under its original projected cost of $40 million.

So kids, perhaps, like Universal and Joss Whedon, we need to start crossing all our fingers for a sequel and maybe, just maybe, like the studio coming out of the red, Serenity Part 2 can come out on the big screen.
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Serenity breaks even and becomes profitable on DVD

There was quite a bit of discussion a while back whether the movie Serenity would make any money for Universal. Well, it seems now on DVD that the movie has moved out of the red and is now making money for Universal. It hasn't exactly made a huge amount of money and there's still some way to go for a sequel to happen, but at least the movie is no longer climbing out of the red.

Here's some figures and number crunching for anyone who's interested:

Serenity costs $39 million to make ($1 million under it's $40 million budget) and while the advertising budget was never made public, people have estimated around $10 million. So overall the movie costs around $49 million for Universal to make. Now Serenity made a disappointing $25 million domestically and $13 million internationally for a total of $38 million at the box office. Now following the 55% rule, where studios get around 55% of the total of the box office, Universal only made $21 million from the box office.

Now there's been no official sales figures for Serenity since it's been released on DVD, only where it's ranked on the sales charts. However, there have been sales announcements for other DVD's above and bellow Serenity and people have managed to do some number crunching and worked out that Serenity sold from 1.104 to 1.605 million copies in the first week of release! Some more number crunching was done to figure out Serenity sold around 825 thousand copies for January 2006. So by now it's definitely over 2 million (possibly high as 2.5 million). Now studios generally take around $12 dollars profit per DVD, with the remaining split between the retailer and distributer. So that's $24 million from the DVD sales, already more than the studio made from the box office. Meanwhile VideoBusiness.com tracked Serenity in bringing in over $9 million in DVD rentals. It has since fallen off the chart, but at the rate of it's decline it's safe to estimate that it manage to make $10 million before dropping too far.

Now the tv rights for Serenity were sold to NBC for a 3 movie package deal for $26 million. Now Serenity was hardly the top movie in the deal, so let's low ball it and say Serenity only gets $5 million out of that deal.

So that's $21 million from the box office, $24 million from DVD sales, $10 million from rentals, and around $5 million from tv rights for a total of $60 million. With Serenity costing $49 million to make and advertise it's estimated that Universal has made $11 million off of the movie. Not nearly enough for Universal to invest in another movie, but there's still profit to be made. The DVD has yet been released internationally and if the domestic sales are any indication, the DVD will make more money than the theatre box office. Especially since Universal International has included a lot of cool extras in the various international editions, the Australian version has a second disk of extras and comes in a cool metal tin, plus one retailer is offering free posters with the movie, another retailer offering Serenity mouse-mats and all sorts of other cool stuff. Meanwhile the DVD has sold well enough for the talked about Special Edition to be made available. The extras have already been produced for the Australian edition and ready to go, the only extra thing that Joss Whedon wants to do is add full cast audio commentary.

Meanwhile those calculations didn't include anything from licensing which has been doing really well. The comic book, movie novelization, books, official t-shirts, RPG have all sold better than expected and more of all these items are on it's way. There's more money to be made out of this franchise yet and a sequel or possibily even a direct-to-DVD sequel might still yet happen.
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Originally posted by Ninah148:

To me the more amazing story is Firefly. It's a set of DVDs for a five-year-old, cancelled show, and it's outselling "Lost" on Amazon. Wake up, people! What we have here is a gen-yoo-wine phenomenon.

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Originally posted by ThePistonEngine:
Shiny.

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Originally posted by Malachite:
I'll buy whatever special edition DVD they put out. Serenity/Firefly is one of those few Hollywood products that I'm happy to put my money into. Keep 'em coming!

I just hope they advertise it better this time...

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Originally posted by BelfastBoy:
"While the sales figures are obviously great, is there really any point in releasing another DVD version? Many people have already bought multiple versions (DVD R1,2,4, UMD etc), to show loyalty to the Firefly 'verse, and also in many cases to get additional special features. My personal feeling is that the point has been proved - Serenity has performed well enough to justify a continuation in some form or another, so would it not be better to concentrate on this? Firefly / Serenity is perhaps the franchise that relies more than any other on fans to keep it alive, so would it not be abusing this good faith somewhat to keep on hawking multiple DVD versions? Or would it be an attempt to demonstrate continuing profitability, albeit in a rather cynical way?

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Originally posted by BelfastBoy:

While the sales figures are obviously great, is there really any point in releasing another DVD version? Many people have already bought multiple versions (DVD R1,2,4, UMD etc), to show loyalty to the Firefly 'verse, and also in many cases to get additional special features. My personal feeling is that the point has been proved - Serenity has performed well enough to justify a continuation in some form or another, so would it not be better to concentrate on this? Firefly / Serenity is perhaps the franchise that relies more than any other on fans to keep it alive, so would it not be abusing this good faith somewhat to keep on hawking multiple DVD versions? Or would it be an attempt to demonstrate continuing profitability, albeit in a rather cynical way?

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