How do movies make money?

16 different ways that we can use to make money out of our film:

Ticket sales

The concession stand

Various cinemas have tried all sorts of bad ideas to cut overheads, from underpaying the staff and keeping them on booby-trapped zero-hour contracts, to letting more or less anybody run the projection booth. I’m sure these have all had some effect, and kept the cats’ cream pouring, but there’s a limit to how much you can cut away before the body dies.So the concession stand becomes incredibly important to the cinema. Those overpriced popcorns, sodas and fat, fattening bags of delicious, deferred arterial congestion are stacked high with price mark-ups, the better to make a cinema into a money-making enterprise.

DVD, Blu-ray or download sales and rental

There are the most profitable form of distribution for the studios. But home video sales have fallen 17 percent since peaking at $21.8 billion in 2004.

Merchandising

T-shirts, lunchboxes, calendars and bedspreads are amongst the other, obvious mainstays of merchandising. The shirt is open to a much wider range of tie-ins, though there’s a lot of ‘homage shirts’ arriving through online marketplaces that aren’t officially licensed at all and while they’re generating revenue for someone, it’s not a film studio or production company. Still, there’s something ‘cool’ about movie shirts that a lunchbox or duvet cover is never, ever going to compete with.

Novelisations, books and video games

Novelisations and video games are a specific kind of merchandise that become new media works in their own right. Not since GoldenEye have I been convinced that a movie-to-game translation was really worth my while but I do still, I think that if somebody really nails an adaptation, and it succeeds as a game as well as just being a tie-in, there’s going to be so much money to be made here that the original film itself could be pushed into the margin.

Tourism

If I were ever to get on a theme park ride again in my life, and I won’t, it would take something very special to lure me in. MaybeBoth Disney and Universal have their own parks, with plentiful movie tie-ins, and other movies have spawned rides and attractions everywhere from Alton Towers to Six Flags.The Halloween Horror Nights would be a subset of this, with their ridiculous, heart-rate battering spectacles more often than not based (loosely) on some existing horror movie franchise or another.I don’t think we’ll ever see a Squid And The Whale roller coaster, by the way.