Deadline’s Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament has returned, and as you’ll see from the most profitable films of 2024 that we’re about to disclose, a movie’s game doesn’t end at the box office. Rather, its downstream revenues and subsequent home windows must be taken into account. Streaming continues to be a wildcard: While traditional motion picture studios such as Disney, Warner Bros, Sony, Paramount and Universal rely on lucrative pay two and pay three streamer deals to catapult their slates into the black, those streamers who’ve embraced theatrical (specifically Amazon MGM Studios and Apple Original Films) have a clandestine metric as to how they evaluate a movie’s post-cinema success. By traditional studio P&L standards, some of those releases would be considered flops. Given that, Apple and Amazon are excluded from this year’s survey. The Most Valuable Blockbuster series runs later rather than sooner as we gather the best data possible from seasoned and trusted sources on 2024’s event films, bombs, and low- to midsize-budget wins.
The Film
WICKED
Universal
Similar to the success we’ve seen lately with Warner Bros/Legendary’s A Minecraft Movie that was 15 years in the making, so was the feature take of $1 billion-grossing Broadway stage musical Wicked. Essentially, when it comes to development and getting it right, it’s worth the wait, and in this case it took close to three decades to get the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West to screen. Initially, Demi Moore was trying to produce a movie version of it, until Pippin composer Stephen Schwartz and producer Marc Platt turned it into a mega global blockbuster, three-time Tony-winning stage musical that became the fourth longest-running Broadway musical ever.
There was a rotation of directors for the film adaptation — J.J. Abrams, Ryan Murphy, Rob Marshall and Stephen Daldry to name a few. The movie was first dated to come out at Christmas 2019, then 2021 before Covid delayed it. Crazy Rich Asians filmmaker Jon M. Chu, a die-hard fan having seen a San Francisco workshop of the musical ahead of its Broadway debut decades ago, signed on in February 2021. During the Covid lockdown, Chu huddled with Platt, screenwriter Dana Fox, Schwartz and musical stage scribe Winnie Holzman. Together, “they walked me through every script they’ve ever made for this movie and the original show and every line why it was written that way, what scenes were cut out, why the lyrics are the way they are, what alternate lyrics that were,” Chu told Deadline.
At that point, Universal and Platt were fully aware of the female-Harry Potter-like powerful appeal of Wicked and opted to split the feature adaptation into two films. That was a risky bet for at the time coming out of Covid, with Broadway musical adaptations on a losing streak at the box office with Universal and Platt’s Dear Evan Hansen, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, pre-Covid Cats, and even Chu’s In the Heights all tanking. Ariana Grande, in arguably her first feature film lead role, had expressed on social media years prior her passion for Wicked and want to play Glinda; the two-time Grammy winner recorded a version of the musical’s “Popular” back in 2012, and had performed another ditty from the stage show, “The Wizard and I”, during an NBC special Wicked 15th Anniversary. Cynthia Erivo previously had performed “I Couldn’t Be Happier,” an excerpt from the song “Thank Goodness,” in the PBS special Wicked in Concert. Despite reports about their auditions, the roles were destined to be the duo’s.
The Box Score
The Bottom Line
Universal’s 360-degree marketing campaign for Wicked was similar to the studio’s blitzkrieg for the Jurassic World and Despicable Me franchises, and is figured at a global cost of $170 million. That included, but definitely wasn’t limited to, a Super Bowl first look with Grande and Erivo also in attendance at the Big Game in jerseys; all Wicked trailers culminated in more than a half-billion global views. Letting the world know this was an event to take seriously, Uni took the stars on a global tour that included premieres and tastemaker screenings in Sydney, Los Angeles, Mexico City and London; it also hit New York with a special screening for current and former Broadway cast leads. There were unprecedented partnerships across every category counting 400 including Amazon, Starbucks, Lego, Mattel, Target and more with a reach of 2 billion shoppers. For a minute there, Universal was playing a game of chicken with another heavily female Thanksgiving movie, Disney’s Moana 2, both sitting the Wednesday before the holiday. Then Uni blinked and moved Wicked on top of Paramount’s Gladiator II on the Friday before Turkey Day. The hope was for another Barbenheimer effect at the box office with respective tentpoles for girls and guys. Wicked broke a slew of box office records, becoming the biggest opening for a feature adaptation of a Broadway movie at $112.5M domestic, and overall with $473.2M stateside and $753M worldwide. The exclusive theatrical window was 40 days to Premium VOD, which didn’t ding any money but rather raked in more with a record $100M haul for Universal included in the $150M home entertainment revenues above. In addition, with 882 million minutes viewed in its first week per Nielsen, Wicked was the most watched feature premiere ever for Peacock. The $60M participations reflect those for Erivo, Grande and Chu as well as other castmembers. Wicked received 10 Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Grande in Supporting Actress and Erivo in Lead Actress, winning two trophies for costumes and production design. The actresses’ PR tour is far from over. In fact, you could say that their performances at this year’s Oscars doubled as an advertised and awards-season promotion for part 2, Wicked: For Good, which is due out November 21. Net profit after all ancillaries is $230M.
