It's definitely a bet... something I realized in the past few years is that expensive Sci-Fi movies (excluding superhero franchises) don't usually make their money back.
Care to look up the top grossing movie of that year? There is plenty of successful sci-fi including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, The Matrix, Transformers, The Hunger Games, and Avatar. Every genre can produce flops, but many of the most profitable movie franchises have been sci-fi movies.
You've cherry picked huge hits across decades... I'm saying generally if the budget is >$100million and it's a Sci-fi (not superhero/franchise), it'll probably not be a hit
And you cherry-picked movies that disappointed. Of course it is harder to find successful movies once you make the condition of ignoring franchises. Franchises come from successful movies. Valerian's lack of success wasn't caused by it not being a franchise movie. It wasn't a franchise because it wasn't successful enough. There would have been a sequel if it made $500m.
Right, so the consistent thing to measure is if the first movie was a hit. So yes, Jurassic Park (1993) is a counter-example to my point. But the sequels are not covered by the rule of thumb
I could be wrong (and potentially this 'big budgets are risky' is the case with big movies movies in general, not only big sci-fi movies.) Just an impression I've been developing
Very few original movies will end up being major successes. You look at the top grossing movies of every year and they are mostly franchises, adaptations, and remakes. This has been true for decades and applies to all genres.
Yes, big movies are in general a risk. Sci-fi movies often have high budgets due to nature of the genre so they come with risk, but I don't think the genre fails at an abnormally large rate compared to other genres.
The movie budgets quoted in the various sites do not include the marketing budget. The rule of thumb is to double the quoted budget and compare with worldwide gross.
I didn't like Tenet either, but it was the first major movie released after the pandemic and had a very troubled rollout for that reason. Not really a fair example.
