Madea’s Big Score
You have money to invest in talent - who do you put your money in? Businessweek put together a project to find the star who gives the best return on investment. Harrison Ford, whom I used as an example in my podcast last week, is not the one. He usually means a lot of money at the box office (forget FIREWALL for now) but he costs an awful lot of money.
It turns out the best ROI right now is Tyler Perry. The writer/director/star of MADEA’S FAMILY REUNION and DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN is responsible for two movies which didn’t crack the $100 million mark, but they didn’t cost much to make either. Business Week bases their calculations of published production costs, grosses, and a an average marketing budget of $20 million. The salary of the star doesn’t figure in directly but is often the lion’s share of the production cost. And the marketing for major studio pictures (i.e. not Lion’s Gate) is figured at $36 million. Tyler Perry, after all this math, has an ROI of 120%. For every dollar you spend on him you get it back plus $1.20.
Though Mr. Perry is clearly a good investment, you should take all these numbers with a grain of salt. Accurate production cost figures are elusive at best, and illusive at worst. The gross is more accurate because you have more than one source, but how much the studio keeps of that is … well, it’s all complicated.
The news isn’t all bad for the warhorses. You’ll get a 53% ROI on both Tom Cruise AND Will Smith, if you can afford to buy in. I’m not sure Cruise is a growth industry but you can’t write him off either… remember how the plot of all his early movies. Boy has everything, boy loses everything, boy fights to reclaim everything and gets a girl with a boy’s name. Ignore that last part. Anyway the point is if he goes down for a while he’ll probably come back, out of sheer force of habit.
Tom Hanks figures at 43% ROI and Ben Stiller at 41%. The article suggests that few women can open a picture, which is conventional wisdom. Julia Roberts might have been on the list but they’re averaging from 2004, and Ms. Roberts has had a spot of classy but unwatched movies since then.
Keep an eye out for Johnny Depp, whose PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movie was enough to get him attention but by the end of this year the runaway success of Dead Man’s Chest should make him right there in the top.
(By the way, if you really do have money to invest, do NOT put it in show business. You get better odds in Vegas. I’d put it in diverse mutual funds or your brother’s dry-cleaning business. At least in those cases, you get to look at the books.)