When it comes to evaluating the financial performance of top movies, it isn’t about what a film grosses at the box office. The true tale is told when production budgets, P&A, talent participations and other costs collide with box office grosses and ancillary revenues from VOD to DVD and TV. To get close to that mysterious end of the equation, Deadline is repeating our Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament for 2017, using data culled by seasoned and trusted sources.

JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

SONY

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THE FILM

Rebooting the 1995 Robin Williams hit isn’t the most original studio idea ever, but who knew that Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle would turn out to be the live action film — excluding James Bond — that is inching toward eclipsing the original Sam Rami Spider-Man gross to become Sony’s biggest ever domestic live action film? Though the film is out on video, it continues on about 1000 screens, as its $401.7M domestic gross is just $2M shy of overtaking the $403.7M of Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle‘s $943M global gross places it behind only Skyfall’s $1.1 billion as the biggest film Sony has released, ever. How did this happen? Sony killed the franchise the first time around when it tapped another Chris Van Allsburg children’s book, Zathura, and used it as the second space-set installment. This time, former Sony exec Matt Tolmach took to Chris McKenna’s (Community) bold pitch about a group of kids who get stuck in a videogame with avatars as their opposites. This allowed for the presence of Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black. They are all expected to reprise with Karen Gillan and director Jake Kasdan in the next installment that Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinkner are writing right now.



THE BOX SCORE

Here are the costs and revenues as our experts see them:

THE BOTTOM LINE

Since Deadline started its Blockbuster Tournament four years ago, this is the most we’ve ever seen a Sony title profit with $305.7M, a figure that’s 53% more than the $200.1M minted by Spider-Man: Homecoming. The combined theatrical spend between production cost and P&A of $252M is average for an event title, and the $730M in revenues offsets the $90M participations soaked up by the film’s stars.