Freddy Vs Jason Vs Michael

Tonight I thought that we would debate the long running "Which is the best slasher franchise?" It's a Horror Battle Royal between "A Nightmare on Elm Street", "Friday 13th" and the "Halloween" franchises.

Now the answer is obviously "Nightmare on Elm Street" but that's just my opinion. Instead I thought that I would take a more empirical (if what a little simplified) look at the highs and lows of the genre. It may be appropriate at this point to let on that my day job is as a finance data analyst, previously it had been a retail analyst so I will use a few simple industry standard techniques to see which franchise and movie is the king of the slashers. For this little mock up. Any results and conclusions are based on the data for fun. Please know that there's great movies in all 3 franchises and I could have used alternative analysis methods to look at the success of the movies (however, the raw data is very much real).

I will be analysing by three main dimensions:

Budget ($)

Gross Profit ($)

Ranking (/10)*

*I will be using IMDB as a data source as it's reasonably impartial.

The aim here is a very simplistic way to establish the below:

What’s the highest Ranking?

Well, as you can see below I’ve plotted the ratings for each movie on the charts below. In terms of rating the original in each series is considered the best. Each franchise seems to deteriorate in quality over time. “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch” and “Halloween: Resurrection” received just 3.9 rankings on IMDB. Although the original Halloween movie tops the rankings chart at 7.9. Overall though there’s very little to choose from in terms of IMDB rating. The average rating chart shows a spread of just 0.58 between the franchises.

 What’s the most profitable?

Interesting here how the 3 franchises made their profits. Friday 13th went low budget but high on quantity. Nightmare on Elm Street was generally declining in profit until reinvented as “Freddy Vs Jason” and the remake. Halloween generally increases profitability after movie 6 “The Curse of Michael Myers”. Looking at the franchised as a whole the data suggests that Friday 13th is the overall most profitable, then Nightmare on Elm Street, followed by Halloween.

 

 What’s the most expensive to make?

The budgets of each franchise are a story in themselves. Nightmare on Elm Street took a simple strategy of building on past success, incrementally increasing the spending. This seems to have worked well and the cash cow keeps giving. Friday 13th took the thrift option of the lowest budgets of the 3 franchises. Only for “Freddy Vs Jason” and the 2009 remake do we see the budgets rise to compete with the other modern movies. These last 2 movies also returned some of the highest gross profits of any of the franchises showing that the budget increase was a good step to take financially. Halloween made an interesting decision after movie 6 “The Curse of Michael Myers” the budgets leapt from $5m to $17, for “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later”. Overall the budgets were the highest for the Elm Street franchise (mostly due to the £35m remake).

 

So, which series is best?

In terms of High Budgets and Overall Ratings “Nightmare on Elm Street” is our winner.

I will give a special award to the original Halloween that converted a budget of $320,000 in to a $46.7m profit for a single movie. In turn leading to a franchise of 10 movies plus another in the filming stage right now.

I will also tip my hat to the “Friday 13th” franchise. 12 movies so far and all made at a cheap budget but capable of getting cinema goers through the doors.

Hopefully you enjoyed this little look in to “Freddy VS Jason Vs Michael”.

Happy hauntings, Jiblet.

Will there be another “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie?

“Nightmare On Elm Street” is a horror series that just keeps on going. So far there have been nine Elm Street movies if you include the remake and “Freddy Vs Jason”. For the purpose of this blog I’m going to ignore the TV series and other related spin-offs).

So, here’s the question: Is the series any good and why so many sequels?

To investigate I’ve pulled data from IMDB for a quick piece of analysis.

Are the movies getting better?

Here I’ve taken the IMDB rank for each movie and plotted a linear trend. From a solid 7.4 for the original, the series drops to a woeful 4.6 by part 6 and recovers to a very average rating of 5.1 for the eventual remake. Overall the trend is negative, people just aren’t enjoying the series as is progresses. My observation here is that the story really doesn’t progress, from start to finish Freddy kills teenagers in their sleep. Ok Freddy Vs Jason set him against an opponent and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare mixed up the formula a little. Overall though there was little in the plot that progressed.

Are the Nightmare on Elm Street movies profitable?

Since the audience becomes more underwhelmed overtime with the series why would New Line continue to make them? Well, money could be the answer. In the chart below I’ve marked user ratings against gross profits for each movie. Part 7 (Wes Craven’s New Nightmare) had budget issues and “The Dream Child” was simply a bad movie. Overall though there is profit in the series which always creates a temptation for the studio to put out another. Interestingly there’s not a particularly strong correlation between user rating and profits. “Freddy’s Revenge” has a generally low rating but a decent box office profit. Conversely “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” is one of the better movies statistically but turned a low profit.

Will there be another “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie?

The short answer is that I don’t know :-) Looking at the profit margins though I will make a guess. What’s important for a studio is the % markup of their movie. Essentially, for the budget given, how well did it turn a profit. The chart below show you how any possibly why New Line keep financing the series.

The original Nightmare on Elm Street had just a $1.8m budget but delivered a $23.7m gross profit, that’s a 1317% mark up. This means that the studio struck gold, of course a sequel at that point was inevitable. Made on a similar budget it too realised a mark-up greater than 1000%. Generally the movie is rated poorly though so it was the momentum from part one that got people through the doors.

As we progress on to movie 5 the returns are dropping radically despite the budgets ballooning. Statistically movie 5 (The Dream Child) looked like the end of the cash cow. However, the movie has no concrete ending. So, New Line came up with the concept for movie 6 “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare”. In the UK we have a saying, “In for a penny, in for a pound”. Since you’ve seen the previous 6 wouldn’t you just love to see “The Final” movie where well before the release it was known that Freddy would be killed off in 3D. With the biggest budget to date and the promise of the end people bought in again and the movie saw a 310% mark-up.

Then we come to an interesting junction in the life of the series. Freddy’s dead, you can’t undo that otherwise you will alienate the fans that will now feel cheated. However, there are clearly fans that will see all 6 movies to date, surly 7 couldn’t hurt. Here’s where Wes steps in and transforms the series. Set in “The Real World” Freddy returns as a sort of urban legend/know evil. The idea was actually not bad (considering the options) and the reception was generally good. The budget of $25m was a real risk though, close to double that of any Elm Street movie before. The profits were terrible but I do feel that Wes put the integrity back in to the series here.

So, what next? Freddy’s dead in the movie world and dead in the real world. It’s clear that a movie of either type would not really be worth the risk. Well, at this point we start to see the series fracture with a spin-off. Having newly acquired the rights to the Friday 13th series it’s was time for a match up between Freddy and Jason. Having a fan base from 2 classic 80’s slashers was always going to get people through the door. A huge $57m gross profit saw “Freddy Vs Jason” top the most profitable (gross) of the Elm Street series to date.

So with the original series gone, the real world option gone and a spin-off where would the series go next. Well, disappointingly there was a £35m remake. At 19 times the budget of the original the remake only made a mark-up of 80% and around only half the gross profit of “Freddy Vs Jason”. Replacing Robert Englund was never going to work in my opinion, he simply is Freddy. Also, the idea by the very nature of a remake has been done before (and again and again in the sequels).

So, will there be another movie.

I believe that yes there will be. Although not announced it would make sense for the studio to keep going. The only real viable option is a concept for “Freddy Vs Jason 2” or even “Freddy Vs Jason Vs Michael Vs Ash Vs Pinhead”. Who knows?. As long as the series is turning profit there will be a producer to make the Elm Street movies. The real question is, Will Robert Englund return as Freddy? Withought him Freddy really is dead and buried.

Happy hauntings, Jiblet.