As Ridley Scott does the press rounds for Sony’s All the Money in the World, he’s taking a moment to take a few shots at the sequel to his 1982 sci-fi actioner. The crux of Scott’s thoughts of the critically-acclaimed but financially underwhelming sequel is that it was much too long (it ran around 152 minutes, plus credits) and that it actually contained a number of his ideas for which he didn’t take official credit.
Meanwhile, Sony’s other big Christmas release, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, has passed the $100 million mark in just eight days of release after a $15m Wednesday for a $104m cume. It has already outgrossed the entire $91m domestic cume of Blade Runner 2049.At a glance, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Blade Runner 2049 don’t have much in common, aside from both being technically Sony productions (Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. distributed Blade Runner 2049 in North America). And, for the record, that Blade Runner did poorly at the box office should not necessarily be used as a reason to argue that the initial critical acclaim was inherently flawed. Even as someone who didn’t like the Denis Villeneuve’s tone poem as much as the rest, I have no interest in seeing a critical reevaluation solely based on its poor box office and thus a rewriting of history similar to The Matrix Reloaded or King Kong.
The reason I am discussing both Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Blade Runner 2049 in the same post is that they stand as polar opposites in terms of how to revamp or revive an IP. And looking at why one is a success and one is a relative bomb provides a key clue in terms of how to proceed with IP development in the future.
First off, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was budgeted at $90 million, which is about what Blade Runner 2049 should have cost considering its realistic box office trajectory. On its face, $91m domestic and $258m worldwide isn’t a bad sum for a long, R-rated, somber, sci-fi drama with a past-his-prime movie star…
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