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As many an internet commentator has been known to claim, Kathleen Kennedy will be out at Lucasfilm any day now. Any… day… now. Except, of course, she isn’t and has maintained her position as head of both Lucasfilm and Star Wars, no matter how many times the internet says otherwise. The reason is simple. Money. Hollywood is a business, and at the end of the day, it is purely a numbers game.
Thanks to the movies being shot largely in the UK, normal murky and byzantine Hollywood Accounting rules can’t be applied. In order to take advantage of tax reimbursements, figures have to be filed with Revenue and Customs across the pond, and this allows the fine folks at Forbes to get to work.
Using the financial statements revealing costs, and previous efforts of industry consultant Stephen Follows and his seminal work on the split of takings between studio and theaters, Forbes has detailed exactly how profitable each Disney Star Wars instalment has been.
This takes into account marketing and distribution costs, but is based purely on box office income. Movies have an earning life way beyond the box office, from DVD sales to streaming rights.
It looks at this through the lens of Return on Investment (ROI), so the figures are balanced out against the costs.
The winner appears to be 2016’s spinoff Rogue One, which made a massive 95.4% ROI on costs of $327.5 million. The loser? 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker only had a 9.9% ROI as its costs came to an eye-watering $593.7 million. This was due to reshoots, a locked release date, a huge cast, and the need for expensive digital trickery after the sad passing of Carrie Fisher.
Here is the full list, straight from Forbes and their partners:
So the movie with the lowest cost made the most profit? Say it ain’t so! It is almost as if there is a lesson in there somewhere.
After Solo made a loss, Star Wars has been rested from the big screen. Disney will be hoping that absence makes the heart grow fonder as The Mandalorian & Grogu is their big hope next year, with Star Wars: Starfighter.
On TV, fortunes have been mixed, with Andor being excellent, and Skeleton Crew proving unexpected fun. Meanwhile, Ahsoka drowned under its own lore, and nobody is quite sure what the hell The Acolyte was meant to be.
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