Forbes: The ‘Star Wars’ Movie With The Highest Profits & some more news

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Analysis of documents filed by Disney has revealed which of its Star Wars movies made the highest profits at the box office and, remarkably, it was the film with the highest costs.

Calculating the profit made by a movie requires knowing how much revenue it generated for the studio and how much it cost to make. The former is a matter of public knowledge through Amazon’s Box Office Mojo while the latter is usually a closely-guarded secret. That's because when movies are made in the United States, studios combine the cost of them in their overall expenses and don't disclose how much was spent on each one.

It’s a different story for movies which are filmed in the United Kingdom. Studios shooting in the U.K. get a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the sum they spend in the country provided that at least 10% of the core cost of the production is incurred there. In order to demonstrate this to the U.K. authorities, studios set up separate production companies there to produce each movie they make in the country.

These companies have to file financial statements which shine a spotlight on the mysterious world of film finances as they disclose everything from the total cost of the production and the level of reimbursement to the number of people on the crew and even their social security payments.

Usefully, all of Disney's Star Wars movies were made in the U.K. so their financial statements can be consulted to reveal their cost and the amount of reimbursement they received. Deducting the latter from the former gives the net spending by Disney but that is only half of the story.

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Since Disney bought Star Wars' rightsholder Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012, it has made five movies about the sci-fi saga and the one with the lowest costs had the highest ROI. This can be seen in the chart below which shows that 2016's Star Wars spinoff Rogue One made a massive 95.4% ROI on costs of $327.5 million (£240 million).

At the other end of the spectrum, 2019’s The Rise Of Skywalker only had a 9.9% ROI as its costs came to an eyewatering $593.7 million (£450.2 million) as this report recently revealed.

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It is important to note that the share of the box office isn’t a studio’s only return from a movie. As a Disney spokesperson told this reporter last year, “there will be other income generated by the production (such as DVD/Blu Ray sales, merchandising, etc.). It’s not reflecting a true account of whether the film was overall profitable.”

However, just as the production generates other income, it also incurs other costs, chief of which are marketing expenses which are not shown in the financial statements of the production companies. Accordingly, if the home entertainment and merchandise sales should be added to the theater takings, the marketing cost should be deducted from them and it is understood that blockbuster sums were spent on the Star Wars movies.

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The Force Awakens – $500.2M
Rogue One - $258.4M
The Last Jedi – $324M
The Rise of Skywalker' – $48.3M
Solo: A Star Wars Story' – -$103.3M

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