An “absurdly sexy” movie has debuted at number one at the box office, but it’s raising a big question mark

“Challengers,” a tennis drama starring “Dune” star Zendaya, debuted at No. 1 at the North American box office. The Guardian describes “Challengers” as an “absurdly sexy” film, but it raises a big question mark.

In addition to Zendaya, the main roles in the film are played by actors Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. With opening weekend grosses of $15 million, Challengers easily topped the North American domestic box office, but had a weak weekend.

On the one hand, it is a respectable result for a film aimed at an adult audience, but what prevents it from being considered a financial success at the box office is its production budget of 55 million dollars, writes Variety magazine, quoted by News.ro.

The production budget is huge for a film of this kind, with no notable special effects, and Challengers probably had a marketing and promotion budget to match. Industry analysts believe that, in general, movies with box office “blockbuster” claims must gross at least 2.5 times their production budget to be considered a financial success.

Amazon MGM, which produced the film, would probably argue that Challengers it doesn’t need to be a box office phenomenon to be successful. Kevin Wilson, director of theatrical distribution at Amazon MGM Studios, said he expects the film to be successful among subscribers to Prime Video, the company’s streaming platform.

In this sense, he compared Challengers with Saltburn, the drama film that the company released last year and which was among the most watched streaming releases. Like Saltburn, the new feature film from Amazon’s film division has received an “R” rating in the United States, which means that in theaters it can be seen by minors under the age of 17 only with an adult companion.

Another similarity between the two feature films is that they were widely praised by film critics. For example, Peter Debruge of Variety magazine calls Challengers “that rare movie that will make you sweat just watching it”.

Amazon bets huge sums of money on its movies and series

But, ignoring Amazon’s optimistic statements and film critics’ ratings, Challengers again raises a big question mark: How much more will the company founded by Jeff Bezos be able to invest in productions that are not financially profitable, especially in the context of the so-called “Great Contraction” in Hollywood?

Amazon MGM has invested huge sums of money in recent years especially on the series side, releasing series like The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power, The Citadel or, most recently, Fallout. While they’ve enjoyed success on Amazon Prime, it’s hard to argue that the viewing hours justify the costs.

About The Citadela spy series launched on Amazon Prime last April, industry sources say it had a production budget of $300 million for the series’ 6 episodes. The Citadel it thus cost more than the movies Chin, Oppenheimer and Dunes 2which had production budgets of $145, $100, and $190 million, respectively.

About Rings of Power it is believed to be the most expensive series in history, and each episode of the first season cost over $100 million to make, bringing the total budget to over $1 billion.

Domino effect on the streaming market?

Some analysts believe that these huge sums thrown by Amazon, and more recently Apple TV+, into the streaming market have largely contributed to the resettlement of the video-on-demand service market over the past year and a half, which has also affected customers from Romania, through measures such as the elimination of “password sharing”, the introduction of subscriptions with advertisements or price increases.

The explanation lies in the fact that the cinematographic divisions of Amazon and Apple benefit from their parent companies’ sometimes seemingly unlimited budgets as they try to gain as much market share as possible in the streaming market.

And in the conditions of an increasingly saturated market, rivals have had to increase their revenues to be able to keep up with the two streaming platforms of the tech giants, which have a market capitalization of 2.61 trillion (Apple) and 1.86 trillions of dollars (Amazon).

Apple and Amazon are the second and fifth most valuable companies listed on the US stock market, respectively.

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