Cinema Cemetery

Which Animation Studio Makes the Most Money?

We’re all here for the same reason. Animated movies come and go, some are smash hits and others flop like a pancake onto concrete.

Today, I’m proud to present some numbers I’ve been crunching that I think are pretty fascinating. Strap in, break out the calculator, and brew that coffee; because we’re about to figure out which animation studio may be the most profitable! Before I spoil the ending, I want you to understand my process for finding this information as well as what the limitations of my calculations are.

I got most of my numbers from boxofficemojo (before IMDB bought the site and made it un-usable) and what I couldn’t find there I usually found a good estimate from the-numbers. Most of this research was done in November of 2018 so it’s possible there are some shifts between then and now, but the differences would be slight.

The first thing I did was look at boxofficemojo’s list of top earning animated movies from 1980 to 2018. From there, I only looked at the top 50 to keep my digging from ballooning into something bigger than I could handle.

It’s easy to see how much a movie made but the list is a little misleading as it shows domestic returns only, doesn’t include promotional marketing costs, and doesn’t account for inflation. I was also really interested in offsetting the cost of a film against how much it pulled in to determine how much the movie actually made after paying for itself.

I’ll use Disney’s The Lion King as an example.

It came out in 1994 and had a production budget of 45 million.

Using an inflation calculator and adjusting that to 2018 USD, that’s closer to 76 million. Still pretty modest for a wide release animated film budget by today’s standards.

General rule of thumb with Hollywood Economics is to double the production budget in order to account for the exorbitant cost of global marketing and promotion for a wide release feature. This brings the speculated, adjusted cost for The Lion King to about 153 million.

Next we have to figure out how much money the movie made.

Boxofficemojo tells us that it pulled in a worldwide cumulative of about 968 million, which adjusted for inflation is roughly 1.6 billion. Seriously.

Next we subtract the estimated 153 million it cost to make it, this gives The Lion King a 1.4 billion surplus.

And people wonder why Disney is strip-mining it’s classic animation library for remakes!

Breaking down the top 50 earning animated films in this fashion certainly took a lot of time, I wanted to do the top 100 but I ran out of time.

Here’s a link to my numbers.

Now that I had each film’s actual profit calculated, I separated them into the studios represented in the top 50: Disney Animation, Dreamworks, Sony Animation, 20th Century, Pixar, Illumination, Blue Sky, and Warner Brothers.

Here we are. The moment of truth. Once we add up each studio’s pure profit we’ll finally know the answer.

Which studio makes the most money?

Adding up all the pure profit returns led to the following ranking:

Pixar on top, followed by Disney Animation...no surprises there.

Illumination comes in third, which I didn’t really expect personally.

Followed by Dreamworks, Blue Sky, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century

The biggest loser here?

Probably Dreamworks to be honest. They have the second highest number of films on the board and yet come in fifth place when it comes to pure profit.

So the simple answer to the question is a resounding PIXAR.

However, let’s make this a bit more fair. Using our new numbers, let’s average a studio’s total pure profit by how many movies from that studio made it to the top 50. The result changes the rankings significantly.

Now first place goes to Disney Animation while Blue Sky, of all studios, takes second place!

Third goes to Illumination and fourth is a seriously downgraded Pixar. Dreamworks drops a rank to sixth place, followed by 20th Century, Sony Animation, and then Warner brothers rounding out the bottom.

Why the big drop for Pixar?

They have the most movies in the top 50 earners and those movies tend to vary wildly in terms of pure profit, this drives down the average. Based on what I saw of their production budgets, they tend to spend more on their films than many other studios as well.

Inversely, Illumination has tiny budgets and huge returns. I would argue that they could spend some of those returns on better scripts in the future but hey, stupid sells, what else is new!

Just for kicks, I also averaged the rottentomatoes scores for all films on the list by studio and, as suspected, Pixar very narrowly sneaks past Disney Animation in the battle for first and second place. Next up is 20th Century, Warner Brothers, and Dreamworks, with Illumination, Blue Sky, and Sony Animation shoring up the bottom of the barrel.

I’ve crunched a lot of numbers and converted a ton of factors, so what’s the big takeaway. For me, it’s this: If you want to consistently get a high level of profit on films (both cumulative and individually) as well as hit a high mark for critical acclaim, Disney Animation is and always has been the king of profit.

This has been Cinema Cemetery, digging six feet deeper into the dirt of filmmaking.

-Alaina Smith