Jackie Robinson And The Economics Of Baseball Movies

Jackie Robinson’s story sees tailor-made for the movies. The famous baseball player broke the color barrier in America’s favorite pass time and became not only a sports hero, but a civil rights hero in the process.  The movie 42, from Warner Bros., topped the box office this weekend with an estimated $27 million in ticket sales, according to Exhibitor Relations.

So it’s worth asking – why has it taken until 40 years after Robinson’s death for a movie to get made? I’m sure there are lots of reasons. But one of the big ones is that sports movies, especially baseball movies, are always a gamble.

These films tend to do very little business overseas. Robinson may be an American hero but the ups and downs of any given baseball game are often lost on foreign viewers. It can be hard to convince them to get invested in a story about a man they may never have heard of playing a game they don’t really care about.

Just look at a list of movies that Box Office Mojo considers similar to 42. The Blind Side (which is about  another specifically American sport, football) is far and away the highest-grossing with $310 million brought in at the global box office.

But 83% of that film’s ticket sales were in the U.S. The movie only earned $53 million overseas.

Foreign box office sales have become more important than ever to big studios. Every single one of the top 30 highest-grossing films of 2012 earned more overseas than in the U.S. The film ranked 31st, Lincoln, is another distinctly American tale. It earned only 31% of its revenue outside of the U.S.

42 was reportedly a passion project for Thomas Tull, head of Legendary Pictures. The financier has helped back huge Warner Bros. hits like The Dark Knight Rises and the Hangover movies so he’s got the money to spare on a baseball film. At an estimated $40 million budget, 42 will need to earn $100 million at the box office to turn a profit.

The vast majority of that will have to come from the U.S. Although the film opened in a few other territories this weekend, including Brazil andCanada, it looks from IMDB that 42 will have a very limited overseas release. Warner Bros. declined to comment on their projections for the film’s international box office.

The film is getting good word of mouth. It earns an A+ on Cinemascore which measures viewers’ sentiment. But the summer movie season is almost upon us. With movies like Tom Cruise‘s Oblivionand and Iron Man 3 hitting theaters in the next few weeks, the little baseball movie could struggle.