'No Time to Die' Needs to Make Almost a Billion Dollars to Break Even

The box office is making a pandemic comeback. But is that enough? 

The pandemic box office has been up and down. Mostly down. It's hard to predict what movies will do well, but people are hoping that a new James Bond movie will help it bounce back. Especially since that movie moved several times to make sure it could capitalize on the moment.

Well, No Time to Die's worldwide box office sits at $314,253,007, that's an incredible number... but since the movie cost $250 million to produce and at least another $100 million to promote, there's a lot of ground left to make up. 

The way movies work is that the theaters take a percentage of the profits. That means that studios take home only around 50% of the box office and have to make a profit off that. With extra costs incurred to move the film away from the worst months of the pandemic, it seems like No Time to Die will need to make somewhere between $800 and $900 million just to break even (according to Variety).

The real question is, can it do that? 

We've seen October movies make money in the past, but those were years where the pandemic wasn't an issue. Recent numbers show that the people most comfortable going back to the movies are young men, who definitely have contributed to Bond's box office. But even the friendly PG-13 rating can't draw in four quadrants if not that many people are coming back to the theaters. It's not like it's a movie suitable for children, and we're also seeing older generations avoiding buying tickets due to the pandemic threat, so there might be a ceiling for how much it can make. 

I don't want to be all doom and gloom. If any movie can do it, I think the newest edition of a Bond movie has the potential, but this has a lot to say about the state of the box office. People are trying to figure out how to get movies back to normal and make sure that releasing them can generate enough money for the studios to greenlight more titles. 

One of the strategies is using IMAX more. It's not just about the big cameras, but you can't get IMAX at home.

“The combination of IMAX technology and this iconic franchise has proven to be a winning one at the global box office, with audiences everywhere turning out to experience Cary Fukunaga’s immersive filmmaking as it was meant to be seen,” the president of IMAX Entertainment Megan Colligan said in a statement. 

Aside from that, the marketing spends and global reach of the title seem like reasons to be optimistic. Bond truly is an international franchise that's still opening across the world, so there are still millions of people to buy tickets. It hasn't opened in China yet, which is a huge market. 

We'll keep you updated as the box office climbs and the movie helps studios figure out if the world is back to normal again. 

Let us know what you think in the comments.