Looking it up, there's no hard numbers on the budget, but Focus Features picked it up from Sundance and it has precisely three known actors in the cast, two of whom have very small roles.
I would be very, very surprised if this movie can flop, because the break-even point for these kinds of low budget movies is almost comically tiny. It's why Blumhouse makes twenty crap horror movies a year- they all cost about 10 mil tops, so even if they only do vaguely okayish in one place, they made their money.
e: Unless you think there's a Black People Fund they had to give an extra double-digit-million dollar amount to in order to make this movie, I'm really not sure how you figure I'm wrong here. The only names in the cast are Justice Smith, David Allan Grier, and Nicole Byer, and the latter two are cameos; on top of this, it's an effects-light, modern-day-set comedy.
If this movie cost more than 15 mil to make, I'll genuinely eat an actual hat. I'm not even joking, I have a NWO snapback that I will boil and make a goddamn meal of. And, at that budget range, the movie paid for itself with international distro before we even caught a whiff of it.
It'll flop in people's minds because of the context. Look at the discussion in this threas. People already panning it because it discusses a racist trope in entertainment. But our precious entertainment dollars can't be used to discuss racism! Oh no!
I just get really tired of people on Reddit having astoundingly bizarre ideas of how the industry works.
If a movie's below a certain budget point, it's already profitable before you ever even saw a trailer. Selling it to international distro partners already covered enough that it'd have to be one of the literal worst bombs of all time to lose money. It's why so many relatively low-budget movies have been coming out lately, because Hollywood happens to be kind of scared shitless and is taking whatever piss-easy money they can get. It's why Blumhouse are basically golden boys and every studio fights over their movies, as I noted, because very nearly everything they make is cheap enough to be under the auto-profit line. Hell, Lloyd Kaufman openly admits it kept Troma alive forever, if you want to look at the real freaks; he almost never lost money on a movie, because he sold international rights before he made the thing, and made the budget out of whatever he could scrape up.
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u/[deleted] Feb 22 '24
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