Universal Box Sets

Last year around September, Universal Studios released several box sets of 10 movies by some of their production companies. There were 10 movies by Illumination who make animated movies like Despicable Me, The Grinch, Secret Life of Pets, and Sing. I already had a lot of those. Another 10-pack of animated movies was by Dreamworks, including Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon. I had even more of these. They also released a horror 10-pack by Blumhouse, which specializes in making cheap horror movies. I actually had 2 of these, having bought Get Out and being given a digital copy of Split, but for the most part wouldn’t touch those (not a fan of horror and there are some bad movies, more on that later). The box set that really caught my eye was from Focus Features with artier movies that get a lot of acclaim and Oscar nominations. Somehow I only had two of these as well, Burn After Reading, which I had gotten For $1 at Dollar Tree and paid $2 for a digital copy, and Moonrise Kingdom for which I paid a lot for the Criterion edition and no digital copy. Each box set was now on sale for $39.99 on blu-ray plus a digital copy. $4 per movie is pretty good if there are things you want and you don’t already have many of them. The Focus set, for instance had Brokeback Mountain, which has a lot of acclaim, but I never wanted to see and I didn’t buy it when it was $2 at Fry’s (and maybe $1 at Dollar Tree even, though it seems like that would be hard to pass up). So I tried to do the math and the purchase was kind of marginal, but definitely some good titles plus digital copies. So I ordered it from Amazon and it came yesterday. It isn’t just 10 stand alone blu-ray movies, but an extra thick blu-ray case with 10 discs inside. There was also a sheet of paper with one code you could redeem for all ten movies. When I redeemed it, instead of getting all these great movies, I suddenly had a bunch of movies I didn’t want, the Blumhouse titles! Reading the reviews of the Blumhouse box set, a lot of people said they had gotten the wrong digital movies, so there must have been some mix-up at the factory. I wrote to Universal and hopefully they will send me a new code for the Focus titles. If I had looked closer, the piece of paper actually said Blumhouse of Horrors 10-movie collection on it.

For me the big difference is quality and some of the Blumhouse movies were really terrible, one of them got a 6 out of 100 from Rotten Tomatoes. Some reviewers questioned why these were even included in a box set. But even the movie that got a 6 also got a sequel, which actually did much better (in fact, a lot of all of the box set movies had sequels, probably to get you to buy those later). Some of the Focus movies were very highly rated, with three getting scores in the 90’s (to be fair, the highest rated Blumhouse got a 98, but that was for Get Out which I already own). So I wanted to compare the two sets and show the difference between acclaimed movies and not so much using both the Rotten Tomatoes score as well as the Metacritic score. My rule of thumb is to avoid buying any movie with a Metacritic score less than 60, and that’s for movies from Dollar Tree that are just $1. Then I thought I would also add box office numbers to compare how the two sets of movies did financially. But as I was going through those numbers, I realized another key component, which is the cost of the movies. So here is what that looks like, with the dollar amounts in millions.

The mostly crappy horror movies actually earned more money at the box office despite much, much worse critical ratings. It isn’t like horror movies are necessarily despised by the critics either, since some of these got good scores. But the cost of the horror movies is a fraction of the Focus movies cost, less than a quarter. So the horror movies were vastly more profitable for the studio. A lot of the box office amount goes to the theaters or advertising, so a movie probably needs to make at least double what it cost to actually be profitable, and some of the Focus movies didn’t quite hit that. On average they did fine (the critical acclaim helps bring audiences in and most also had major Oscar nominations), making about 5 times their cost. But the horror movies made back over 25 times their cost!