Get Out is far and away the most profitable movie among the nine Best Picture 2018 Oscar nominees. It’s been quite eventful year for Get Out, writer/director Jordan Peele’s horror thriller that layers in commentary about race relations in America. On top of the film’s stellar take of $176 million take domestically and nearly $79 million more overseas for a global cume of $255 million, Get Out not only earned critical acclaim with a 100 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes out of the gate (it has since dropped to 99 percent), it’s been one of the most high-profile films during awards season, earning multiple nominations and trophies from industry and critics’ groups.
Without question, Get Out’s crowning achievement is it reception by voters with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who nominated the film for Best Picture, Best Actor for star Daniel Kaluuya, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay (both for Peele). And as the days slowly tick by for the big moment when the Oscars are handed out Sunday night in Hollywood, an analysis of the film’s profits in comparison to its Best Picture competitors shows Get Out is already a big winner.
According to Gold Derby, Get Out has the highest return on investment (ROI) out of all the films up for the top trophy. The winning formula breaks down as follows: After the film’s $5 million production budget is subtracted from its worldwide gross, Get Out’s global tally stands at $250 million. Divided by the same $5 million production cost, the film has a ROI factor of 50, or 5,000%.
Gold Derby says that none of the other eight nominees comes close to Get Out in terms of gross-to-cost ratio, save for director Christopher Nolan’s World War II epic Dunkirk. With a global take of $525 million, Dunkirk was the highest-grossing Best Picture nominee worldwide; yet because it cost $100 million to produce, its ROI was 4.25, or 425%.
On paper, the numbers for either film obviously bode well, but nothing in Hollywood is ever so cut-and-dried. Clearly the numbers don’t take into account other important factors, including the amount of money spent on marketing their respective theatrical releases, or the likely exorbitant amount of money laid out for awards season campaigns.
Another huge factor with the films are the back-end percentage deals the stars and directors have with their respective studios, which depending on how pacts are structured, could seriously alter a film’s bottom line. Even taking those factors into consideration, the fact that Peele was a first-time filmmaker with Get Out, and the cast, while talented, didn’t cost Universal Pictures an arm and a leg, there’s no question that the movie made a ton of cash during its lucrative theatrical run.
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Source: Gold Derby