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Here’s how you can create disagreement online:
Just talk past the other person.
It’s that easy!
For example, I constantly read articles about how “horror is the most bankable film genre”, but I almost never read articles about animated or family films being “the most bankable genre”, when, clearly, they are the most bankable genre. How can both articles be right at the same time?
Well, it begs the question, “What do you mean by ‘bankable’?”
That’s what I’m going to explore today, while updating my (now annual) comparison between horror and animated/family films. (Stay tuned, horror fans, there’s good news ahead.)
Introducing the “Five Factors” of Box Office Success
When it comes to feature films, one could actually define success in a few ways. I’ve boiled it down to five, reminiscent of basketball’s “four factors” or The Goal’s three metrics.
Let’s start with the first three factors:
- Total Revenue: In other words, the total amount of money a film makes at the box office and PVOD/TVOD windows. This is a good proxy for “overall customer demand” for a film. The movie theater owners, especially, REALLY care about this.
- Profit. Take all the money a movie makes and subtract all the costs. That’s the total profit. Bigger films yield bigger profits, and this is the metric the big movie studios care about most.
- Return on Investment (ROI): Take a film’s profits, and divide it by the costs. That gives you your “return”, meaning profit in percentage terms. The higher the return, the better the investment.
For example, if you’re a movie theater owner, you don’t really care if a small horror film has a great ROI if you don’t sell enough seats overall to keep your lights on. You care about overall revenue/demand. But if you’re an independent producer, you just want to get a big return on investment on your films.
Let me illustrate this. Clown in a Cornfield made $7 million in the US off a $1 million budget. Great! That’s a good ROI. But The Minecraft Movie made $423 million. While the producers of Clown in a Cornfield made $3.5 million, so did movie theater owners. But those theater owners made $211.5 million off of The Minecraft Movie, or sixty times Clown in a Cornfield. If you own a movie theater, you need more movies like The Minecraft Movie to survive.
Those are three metrics to look at individual or film slate success. But when we’re debating or analyzing movie “genres”, two more factors come into play:
- Hit Rate: How often does a given genre (or other big categories like IP, language, and so on) produce hits? At what rate? We can also ask this question for production companies and studios.
- Ceilings: Certain genres have higher or lower box office “ceilings”, meaning the highest potential box office, than others. Kids animation and superheroes are as high as they get, while horror and prestige films tend to be much lower.
Often, when I read box office coverage, I notice that people (including me) interchange all these terms, and often when folks disagree with each other, they’re just talking about different metrics.
Visual of the Week: Lilo & Stitch, The Minecraft Movie, and 2025 Horror Films So Far
So here’s the big visual of the week, two family films versus an entire genre:
Here’s the “Data 5W’s” for this chart:
What: Box office dollars
What: By film or genre
Who: The-Numbers (for box office data)
Where: Both U.S. and Globally
When: The first half of 2025
This chart perfectly illustrates what I’m talking about. For theater owners, two films, by themselves, generated nearly as many sales as the buzziest genre (horror) in filmmaking.
Right now, blockbuster family films are keeping the lights on for theater owners. But not only are hit animated films absolutely huge, their hit rate is elite, especially sequels or movies based on popular IP animated features. In 2023 and 2024, the animated genre only had two misses. That’s insane. (I should clarify, for films with wide theatrical releases. Smaller, independent animated films struggle to stand out.)
Interestingly…
Horror films did way, way better compared to the last time we did this exercise.
Last year, I compared animated films to the entire horror genre, and Inside Out 2 beat it. This year, the biggest film and the horror genre essentially tied. (Also, the time frame is much shorter, just six months instead of nine months.)
What matters is why this fight is so much closer this year…
The Horror Genre is Delivering Big Hits Again
So far in 2025, the horror genre has delivered some big hits and great ROI. Not only have ten films grossed over $19 million so far this year, Sinners grossed $278 million in the US, Final Destination: Bloodlines grossed $137 million, and 28 Years Later grossed $63 million.
When I wrote about how Inside Out 2 made more than all horror films combined, the main point I was trying to make was that horror, as a genre, needed to deliver more big hits—to cite the four factors, horror needed to raise its ceiling and increase its total revenue—and this year, they had three big hits and one genuine blockbuster (over $250 million). And the genre still has some big swings coming for the rest of the year, like the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Black Phone 2, The Conjuring: Last Rites, and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, of course.
Other Thoughts and Takeaways:
- Interestingly, bigger budgets seem to be helping horror films. It’s no coincidence that the top three horror films all have the top three budgets this year. Even Jason Blum agrees, telling Matt Belloni that Blumhouse is pivoting to larger budgets. Eyeballing the last few years, this correlation holds, with films like A Quiet Place: Day One and Alien: Romulus clearly generating the best box office returns among horror films.
- Again, this ties to the “five factors”. If you increase your budget, you decrease your ROI in percentage terms, but improve your profitability in raw terms.
- Globally, Horror Films Are Struggling. If you only looked at US box office, this visual wouldn’t be impressive at all. Sinners, with its massive domestic haul, only saw 23% of its total grosses from overseas. But it’s not just Sinners. Multiple horror films garnered almost nothing overseas, like Heart Eyes, The Woman in the Yard, or Bring Her Back. Other films like Wolf Man and M3GAN 2.0 did okay at best. (The horror films that did fare well overseas were Final Destination: Bloodlines, 28 Years Later, and Until Dawn.)
- Global revenue helps drive profitability. This also ties into the profitability versus ROI discussion. Horror films need larger budgets to garner more box office (increase overall revenue, while decreasing ROI), but bigger budgets also usually demand strong overseas performances, which horror films don’t have.
- Too Many Horror Films. Finally, if the market gets over-saturated with horror films, their ROI is going to go down, something some very smart people (like Jason Blum) are already worried about.
- We Need More Family and Animated Films. I’ve been banging the drum on animation for years. Yet compiling the data for this update, I noticed that, once again, there are not nearly enough animated films on the calendar! Dog Man and King of Kings made money, while Elio didn’t, and…that’s about it for notable animated films so far this year. Sonny Bunch and I have been banging this drum for years now, and I’ll keep banging it: We need more animated and family films! That’s the highest-grossing and most profitable genre.
- To counter the counter-argument right away: original animation is in a slump. Sure—though some originals like The Wild Robot, Migration and Elemental have made money— but guess what? There are oodles and oodles of kids/animated IP out there.
