The Most Profitable Movie of All Time

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 14, 8:30AM EDT

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What the public sees when it comes to the success of movies is usually box office sales. Figures for the most successful movies range into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The highest box office sales figure is for “Avatar” (2009) at $2.8 billion. A new measure has been added as the age of streaming video emerges. How many times has a movie been watched online? Among the most streamed movies produced by streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix, “The Crown” has been streamed over 16 billion times.

Production studies and film financiers care about another measure, perhaps even more. Did a movie make money? In some cases, producers have been badly burned. “Mars Needs Moms” is often at the top (or bottom) of the lists of films that lost the most money. That box office shortfall has been pegged at over $110 million.

At the far end of the spectrum are films that have been unbelievably profitable. To find the most profitable movies, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the worldwide gross for every dollar in the production budget using data from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. We obtained photos from IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon. To make the list we considered, each had to return at least $29 for every dollar in the production budget.

“The Sound of Music,” which had a production budget of $8.2 million, ran for four and a half years in its initial theatrical release. Its amazing longevity helped it build up its worldwide gross of $286.2 million.

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More than five decades after that movie was released, “Get Out,” with a budget only 55% of the musical’s (not adjusted for inflation), returned $50.50 for every dollar it cost.

The most profitable movie of all time was “Mad Max” (1979). Here are the details:

Average return for every dollar in production budget: $498.80
Worldwide profit: $99.6 million (1,030th out of 3,469)
Production budget: $200,000 (3,455th)
Worldwide gross: $99.8 million (1,409th)
Domestic gross: $8.8 million (2,932nd)

Click here to read about all the most profitable movies of all time.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.