From the Wikipedia article of the film:
Budget: $550,000
Box office: $59.8 million
The ratio here is about 50x
Are there any other films with a higher ratio?
Movies & TV Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for movie and TV enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityFrom the Wikipedia article of the film:
Budget: $550,000
Box office: $59.8 million
The ratio here is about 50x
Are there any other films with a higher ratio?
There are a few 'freaks' in the film industry, where films were made on a shoestring as festival films, but then managed to secure a cinematic release.
El Mariachi is the poster child for this. It had a combined budget of around $7000, most of which went on film stock and props, and went on to gain a theatrical box office of more than a million dollars (and subsequent video and DVD sales far in excess of this number).
That would make their box office-to-budget ration nearly 150x
Two questions there.
At face value, Blair Witch is often cited with a good ratio, with production budget of 600k, box office of 250m; Mad Max budget about 250k, box office of 100m; Paranormal Activity 230k, box office 195m, etc.
If you are comparing to todays budgets, what we have now seems massively inflated, but is just what it costs to do things today.
Back then, overall budgets were much smaller in those days - look at the budgets of competing that films that year. Only The Shining (and Dressed to Kill was comparatively large too) was huge, everybody else hovers around 1-3m or less.
Several years later you had the big hit of Terminator, budget seems small at 6.5m, return was around 80m.
The success of the original made its sequel become a tentpole feature, and cost 100m to make, and had a return of 520m.
Like everything else, over time everything costs more.
Movies like Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity (PA originally filmed for 15k), in todays industry, were unusual in their success and are not common.