Dreamgirls boxoffice, as of March 15, 2007:
Domestic: $102,706,394 70.1%
Foreign: $43,871,874 29.9%
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= Worldwide: $146,578,268
Post numbers again at the end of the year. If you were to have posted Phantom of the Opera's grosses at this point from the same source, you would have posted about 85 mil for domestic and about 40 foreign. At the end of one year, you would have had to amend your post and say SPOO, because the domestic was, in reality about 55 mil and the foreign was about 25 or something.
But, let's say those Dreamgirls figures hold - the film is still a financial failure and not a small one - the simple Hollywood box-office rule of thumb is a film has to make two-and-a-half times its production costs, which, in the case of Dreamgirls was about 80 mil, from what I've seen. The math is simple.
The only people who will see profit from Dreamgirls are the composer/lyricists - the album has done fine and they make their publishing. When you add on the at least fifty mil Dreamworks/Paramount spent (probably more) on over-publicizing the film, well, even if the DVD sells a million units it's not going to break even - not anywhere near. And it did not gross that amount of money domestically - I said it about POTO and I was right, and I'm saying it about Dreamgirls. This has nothing to do with the film itself - this is strictly about box-office and how studios and these silly box-office sites get it wrong (the studios reasons are obvious).
And the reason reality finally sets in at the end of the day is because they have to actually present real numbers to their shareholders. That, or present them with a nice check.
