15 Most Profitable Movies Of All Time

Movies are a serious business, and they cost a lot of money to make. There are costs most moviegoers know nothing about, making their reported production costs only one small part of the puzzle. Because of this, movies have to make an obscene amount of money to be profitable.

Determining how much money a studio makes in profit is no easy task. Studios rarely release this information, so the only way to make that determination outside of handy but rare reports like Deadline's yearly reports, is to look at the averages in terms of costs for marketing, production, and distribution.

Typically, a movie that costs $150 million to make will spend an average of $120 million on marketing, $50 million on prints, $30 million on manufacturing, and another $60 million on participation, overhead, and residuals. At the end of the day, a $150 million movie costs a studio an average of $410 million (its break-even point).

For ticket revenues, a studio receives an average of 60% domestically, and about 30% from foreign markets. Once it's all taken from the total box office yield, the studio only receives, on average, a total profit of around 45%.

Since the beginning of the industry, movies have raked in billions, but of all those films and all that cash, these ten have proven to be the most profitable movies ever made in terms of total money earned.

Amounts have been adjusted for inflation to what they would have made in 2020, though the numbers don't include theatrical re-releases, rentals, or video sales.

It took a little time, but in 2018, Black Panther finally got a solo film — and it was amazing. The movie introduced several elements to the MCU that would ultimately play a larger role in the confrontation with Thanos. Still, at its core, Black Panther was the story of T'Challa, the King of Wakanda.

Black Panther was something of a gamble, and it wasn't clear that it would do as well as some of the other newly-introduced MCU characters. When it did come out, it blasted the naysayers out of the water and went on to become the second highest-grossing film of 2018.

Looking at the numbers, the film wasn't inexpensive. The production costs alone came to around $207 million, which is to say nothing of the other costs that go into releasing a film. Marvel and Disney put a lot of cash into Black Panther, so it had a relatively high break-even point.

Still, it raked in nearly $1.4 billion at the global box office, so there was a lot of cash to go around when it came time for the studio to tally up the profit. Once all the necessary costs are taken into consideration, Black Panther made an estimated profit of $476.8 million.