BTW, we also know how much advertising cost. 110 MILLION. Who knows if Legendary/Universal has to pay for it all, but Deadline pointed it out. I'll post it AGAIN.
The bigger play for this $160M production +$110M P&A vehicle is overseas. Global B.O. currently stands at $286.1M with 55% coming from China. Industry sources tell Deadline that breakeven is at $500M worldwide.
It depends on the movie. You take production cost then add marketing cost then the studio needs to make about twice that in box office(due to the studio only getting back about half of ticket sale money). Then there are cuts taken out of that money for actors or producers sometimes. Then studios often get money back from locations which will give them money to film there as an incentive as well as for product placement in some movies. Then you also have money which is made off of rentals, ppv and disk sales after the theater run. So there are many factors in play when you talk about how much money a movie needs to make from box office to turn the studio a profit. Deadline.com sometimes does profit breakdowns which include all of these factors to give a close estimate of how much money a studio actually made off of a movie. Warcraft has a $160m production budget and then prob spent $80m or more on marketing which is why it needs to make $500m in order to break even just off of box office returns. That is just one part of the whole revenue picture though. The studios make a lot off of post theater revenue. Plus a movie like Warcraft will have lots of merchandising tie ins.