Box Office: While 'Star Wars' Broke Records, 'Spectre' Grossed Nearly $900M Worldwide

I would have loved to have trumpeted this post by proclaiming that Spectre had crossed the $200 million mark in domestic grosses, but that’s not going to happen. The film, which is still playing in 217 theaters and earned $170k last weekend, now sits with a domestic total of $199.270m. The film is on Video On Demand and will arrive on DVD/Blu-Ray on February 9th. For all intents and purposes, the theatrical run of the 25^th 007 adventure has reached its end. So how did James Bond do this time out? Well, pretty darn spectacular, actually.

Well, in terms of comparisons, worldwide is a little harder to judge against the franchise because only 40% of the entries have worldwide grosses listed on Box Office Mojo. But the film earned an obscene $877 million worldwide on a $240m budget, so it’s obviously a huge hit. It earned vastly more than the last two Mission: Impossible films ($694m and $682m respectively), Fast & Furious 6 ($788m), Fast Five ($621m), and American Sniper ($547m worldwide, although with $350m of that in America). It is one of the biggest-grossing “non-fantasy” action movies of all time behind only Furious 7 ($1.5b), Skyfall ($1.1b), and (if you want to count them) the last two less-than-fantastical Dark Knight movies (both over $1b).

Spectre made $105 million less domestic and just $126m less overseas than Skyfall. But its mere overseas total ($678m) is ahead of every worldwide total for every other 007 movie save Skyfall, coming in ahead of the $599m worldwide gross of Casino Royale and the $585m gross of Quantum of Solace. And heck, if you play the whole “overseas deflation” game, you can make the case that Spectre’s overseas gross in 2012 dollars (very rough math) would be around $888m (1.3x) to $949m (1.4x) outside of America had the dollar not gained strength over the last few years. That’s speculative, but it does indicate that Spectre got a lot closer to Skyfall than I would have guessed absent other factors. In terms of domestic grosses, it was easily the second-biggest grosser of all time for the franchise behind Skyfall ($304m) and came in ahead of Quantum of Solace ($168m) and Casino Royale ($167m).

If you want to play the “adjusted for domestic inflation” game, and of course you do, then Spectre ends up at 14^th out of 25 films, or just below dead center. To be fair, Skyfall had to deal with Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the Twilight finale, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Quantum of Solace had to deal with a really soft end-of-year lineup (sorry, Valkyrie and Four Christmases), and Casino Royale also had no big end-of-year fantasy spectacular to battle (Night at the Museum was huge, but it was a $30m opener than legged it to $250m after Christmas). Even though Spectre was mostly finished by the time Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened, Walt Disney was able to basically dominate the media with Star Wars madness pretty much right after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, the film sits just below the $204 million “adjusted” gross of Quantum of Solace and just above the $187m “adjusted” gross of Octopussy. And it basically sold more tickets than every single Roger Moore entry on the list save the fluke-y Moonraker. That film was both “James Bond Does Star Wars” and capitalizing on being the follow-up to the “save the franchise” popular The Spy Who Loved Me. It earned a then-record high $70m in 1979 (versus the $46m of The Spy Who Loved Me which was the biggest grosser since Thunderball back in 1965) which stood as the biggest of the franchise until GoldenEye really did resurrect the series in 1995.

Anyway, Spectre sold fewer tickets than every Pierce Brosnan entry and the prior three Daniel Craig movies. It outsold both Timothy Dalton entries and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as well as Dr. No (the first 007 movie) and the kinda-sorta-doesn’t count Never Say Never Again. As I’ve noted before, there is no small irony in a James Bond movie that tried to get the franchise back to the somewhat conventional tropes and conventional ideas about what a James Bond movie should be then performing (domestically) like a middle-of-the-road 007 movie at the box office.

But here’s the good news: The film, which was loved by few and disliked by quite a few, still managed to earn $199 million domestic off a $70m opening weekend (a solid 2.85x multiplier) and earned a nutty $877m worldwide. This will be the last EON Productions 007 movie distributed by Sony in the current contract, and it’s likely that the franchise will end up elsewhere. Point being, if Spectre is now over/under the “new normal” for the James Bond franchise, then any studio who can afford it (and can negotiate favorable terms) should jump at the prospect. The 007 franchise is such that even casual fans have no qualms about spending 2.5 hours and $8-$15 once every two-to-three years to check out the new movie no matter how good or bad the last one was. That's franchise gold. 

Conventional wisdom says Paramount/Viacom Inc. or Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. ends up with it, but Walt Disney could always dig around for some spare Disney dollars and acquire it just for fun. The next entry will probably be Daniel Craig’s swan song and will definitely be out by 2017 in order to capitalize on the 55^th anniversary of Dr. No. That means, barring variables, that the numbers put up by Spectre may very well be topped by the 26^th 007 movie. And even if that’s not the case, the franchise can do a pretty big overseas nosedive next time out and still be among the biggest “non-fantastical” franchise going today. If Spectre is anything resembling “the new normal,” then the 007 franchise may well have all the time in the world.

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