Question: What's the deal with the 'Scary Movie' franchise?

Open forum question from JD Walters:

Can you explain from more of a marketing point of view why the makers of "Scary Movie" are still around to grace us with "Stan Helsing" when every movie since the original SM has been critically demolished, and as far as I know didn't do great commercially either?

JD, you have asked one of Our Universe's Really Big Questions: What the hell is up with that whole Scary Movie thing? In fact, I would not be surprised to learn that in a parallel universe affected by a quirky time-space continuum thingee, the inscrutable success of the SM franchise mysteriously converted into a whole yin-yang deal leading to the eradication of dinosaurs, the destruction of the Mayan civilization, and the collapse of the New York Mets the last two weeks of the 2008 baseball season.

Let's look at the facts. First the box office numbers for said movies (produced and distributed by Miramax) compared to their reported production budgets:

Scary Movie: $278M worldwide. Production budget: $19M.

Scary Movie 2: $141M worldwide. Production budget: $45M.

Scary Movie 3: $220M worldwide. Production budget: $48M.

Scary Movie 4: $178M worldwide. Production budget: $45M.

So we're talking about spending $157M in cumulative production costs and generating $817M in overall box office revenues. Putting to use my vast mathematical skills, I calculate that...

These movies made a whole crapload of money!!!


Figure in ancillary revenue streams -- DVDs, cable, etc -- you are easily talking about a billion dollar franchise. But are profits the only way Hollywood assesses a movie's value? Let's look at how movie fans have reviewed these, ahem, 'films' at IMDB.com:

Scary Movie: 5.9 out of 10.

Scary Movie 2: 4.7 out of 10.

Scary Movie 3: 5.4 out of 10.

Scary Movie 4: 5.1 out of 10.

That averages out to a 5.2, almost exactly equating to an "Average" rating (which in all fairness, I should note is just slightly under K-9's milquetoast 5.5 rating).

But wait, perhaps we need a more discriminating group of critics, like the fine folks at RottenTomatoes.com as they weigh in with their favorability ratings:

Scary Movie: 52%.

Scary Movie 2: 14%.

Scary Movie 3: 37%.

Scary Movie 4: 38%.

Which adds up to a below average 35% rating (which again, in all fairness, rates significantly higher than K-9's awful 25% RT rating).

Or another way of looking at it is that the uptick from 37% to 38% of the last two SM movies could mean that if they keep making Scary Movies, and the positive response goes up 1% per flick, by the time we get to Scary Movie 66, they could have a 100% favorable rating.

So where does all this analysis lead us? Basically your question can be boiled down to this: How could an average (5.2) to poor (35%) movie franchise generate over one billion dollars in revenues worldwide?

Answer: Because there are a lot of stupid consumers in the world, that's why.

For a more enlightened analysis, you can always visit The Artful Writer which is co-hosted by Craig Maizin, who co-wrote Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4.

P.S. Did you notice the trick question in my post: "But are profits the only way Hollywood assesses a movie's value?" If that didn't cause you to spew whatever beverage you happened to be drinking in a jet-stream out of your proboscis, you need to have your fix on reality adjusted.