I’ve just stumbled across this interesting new infographic over at the image sharing website Imgur, which details the films that have delivered the biggest return on investment over the last five years. The only minimum requirement for inclusion was total box office takings of $30 million worldwide.
There are some interesting things to come out of this little bit of research. Here’s how they calculated the numbers.
Return On Investment was calculated as [0.5 * International Revenue / Production Budget – 1] This is an approximate measure of a movies return on investment only as many other factors come in to play when determining a films actual ROI.
Okay, so as you can see the really interesting this is that The Devil Inside is clearly the film with the biggest return on investment at 5000%. The 2012 film cost a reported $1,000,000 to make (not including marketing and other costs) and took a huge $53,000,000 at the domestic box-office three years ago ($100m internationally). The film was poorly received by critics (including our own), but the public lapped it up. In fact, if you look at the top ten, nine of them are horror movies, with the tenth film on the list, God’s Not Dead, falling in the Christian genre.
The King’s Speech is the top drama on the list in terms of return on investment, and indeed the highest polling British film, but it does seem that if you’re investing in Hollywood, then a horror film is the way to go…
