The only reason I’m writing about this is to let you know this isn’t all that much of a story, though you are going to see it reported around the Internet as if it is. We all knew about the animated Angry Birds movie, which will be released by Sony on July 1, 2016, based on the mobile video game from Rovio. Now, in a report from Cineuropa (via The Playlist) they say the film carries a €75 million production budget, accompanied by a marketing and distribution budget of approximately €100 million. Carry the one, subtract two, throw it in a converter and that ends up being about $186 million U.S. dollars. I can hear you saying, “That’s over $100 million more than Paramount and Nickelodeon spent on The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water and even more than the $135 million Dreamworks spent on Home,” but hold on… just hooooooold on.
Note the fact this says that actual budget of the movie is €75 million, which is just shy of $80 million U.S. dollars. This is the number you hear referred to whenever studios or box office reports refer to budgetary figures, which means the budget on this one is just above that of the recent SpongeBob movie and far less than Dreamworks’ Home, both of which, however, carried a likely $100+ million marketing budget on top of the reported figure.
This marketing number is a figure that pretty much never gets discussed. It’s why you can’t look at a film’s reported budget against its box office receipts and make an apples-to-apples comparison (though that constantly, and irritatingly, continues to happen over and over again). When studios start officially reporting the marketing money spent on these movies, along with theater splits, overseas deals, etc. then maybe we’ll get a better idea of just how well these movies are actually doing in theaters.
As for Angry Birds, it’s a modest number by Hollywood standards, thought it is a large amount of money for a Finnish production and, in fact, the largest ever. The voice cast includes Jason Sudeikis, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage and Ike Barinholtz and you better believe each of those names carries a dollar figure with it.
Will the money spent be worth it when it comes to Angry Birds? All I know is my friend’s son plays the “Angry Birds Transformers” game non-stop and with an “Angry Birds Toons” in the works and the massive marketing potential I don’t see how it won’t capture audience attention. Add to the fact it features a pretty stellar comedy voice cast and I have to assume it will be more than little kids flocking to the theater to give it a look.
