8 Lessons Studios Must Learn To Avoid Making Box-Office Duds
4. Good Movies Are More Likely To Succeed
As obvious as that may sound to say, studios don't always seem to get the message. A lot of the time, they think that big stars like Dwayne Johnson, or impressive spectacle like Transformers, will save them. It won't.
Using 2017 as a case study, there's often a direct relationship between box-office flops and bad movies in that they tend to be one and the same.
Baywatch and King Arthur, two of the year's biggest flops, both scored less than 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets also scored poorly, with a rotten 50%, as did Will Ferrel's The House, with an abysmal 17%. Both of them flopped, too.
On the other hand, the success stories all earned it. Wonder Woman - the DC Cinematic Universe's top domestic earner, by a mile - scored 92%. It: Chapter One is sitting pretty at 85%, and Get Out surprised everyone with a staggering 99%.
There are exceptions of course - Blade Runner 2049 flopped but scored 89%, and critics ripped Pirates 5 to shreds but it still made nearly $800 million worldwide - but on the whole, if studios focused on making the best movie possible instead of crapping something out and hoping for the best, their returns would probably be better.