Superhero vs. Animation

Two genres were consistently at the top of the Hollywood charts throughout 2016, those were Superheroes and Animation. Both released big-name films that brought many profits for their genres. Even though Superhero movies brought more in overall profits, animation was able to bring in a higher percentage of profits due to their smaller production budgets, following a continuous trend.

Superheroes and Animated movies are the highlights of Hollywood lately. The top Superhero movies of 2016: Captain America: Civil War, Suicide Squads, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, and Deadpool. According to critics, they would say that Captain America: Civil War and Deadpool stood out while Suicide Squads and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows flopped. The top animations of 2016: Zootopia, Finding Dory, Sing, and The Secret Life of Pets. Critics would all agree that these movies did exceptionally well all receiving good ratings. Both genres received large profits, but the profits gained from animations are so much more due to their smaller production budgets, compared to those of superhero movies which are rather large. To make this a more valid and fair argument we’ll look at the percent of profits gained by each movie.

The data shows that the animation genre consistently shows a higher percentage gained in profits, The Secret Life of Pets with the most at 1167% in profits, followed by Sing with 846%, then Zootopia with 683%, and lastly with Finding Dory with 514%. Comparing this to the Superhero genre, we have Deadpool with a surprising 1350%, followed by Captain America: Civil War with 461%, then Suicide Squad with 426%, and finally Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows with 182%. It’s safe to say that the animation genre did far better than the superhero genre, even with Deadpool’s outstanding returns. An important factor of why animations often do better than the Superhero genre was movie ratings, all the animations on this list were rated PG so it can reach out to a much larger audience than these Superhero movies have. Yet, this doesn’t make sense for Deadpool as it’s rated R, compared to all the other movies on the list that are rated PG-13, and it blows everyone else out of the water in percent of profits. These Superhero movies made a total of $2,927,641,376, while spending $618,000,000 on production budgets, compared to animations making $3,562,143,469, while only spending $500,000,000. Animations from this view show how much more successful they can be, spending $118,000,000 less on productions costs but making more than $500,000,000 more.

Animations are more profitable; they pay less and make more. These large production costs by Superhero movies hinder it from maximizing its profits, they spend an unnecessarily large amount on movies. We can clearly see a low budget movie with large profits with Deadpool, this low budget forced it to be more creative rather than relying on big explosions and an expensive arsenal of actors to make it good as other superhero movies have relied on. If these large budget movies were able to reduce their budgets from $250,000,000 to $200,000,000, Captain America: Civil War, it would increase their profit percentage from 461% to 577%, a profit percentage increase of over 100%. This seems to be following a trend as we look at the percent of profits from the year before, 2015. Animations like the Minions have an outstanding 1567%, followed by Hotel Transylvania 2 with 592%, and Inside Out with 490%. The Superhero genre once falls short with Avengers: Age of Ultron with 562%, Ant-Man with 399%, and Fantastic Four with a mere 140%. It even continues this trend when looking at the year before that, 2014. The animation selection for this year was rather weak but they still put out impressive numbers with The LEGO Movie at 782%, Rio 2 at 485%, How to Train your Dragon 2 at 429%, and Big Hero 6 with 398%. The superhero genre put out a decent number with Guardians of the Galaxy at 455%, Captain America: Winter Soldier with 420%, X-Men: Days of Future Past with 374%, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with 283%. Even with they had big names they struggled to compete with the animation genre, who had a rather poor line up, especially comparing it to Spiderman, Captain America, and X-Men, who are all well known. Both genres make virtually the same amount of profits, but the production budget for superhero movies is just so large that it kills the percentage that it makes.

The question you’re probably asking is: “Why don’t you just make more animations if you want to make more money?”. There must be a balance, you can’t just have only animations because they have a better return value, it would get old and worn out. Also, Hollywood is at a stage right now where they just keep pumping out these Superhero movies and it’s at a high point right now, so many people love them, they can make animations whenever they want to. Both genres received a majority of their profits from foreign grosses than domestic, except for The LEGO Movie, so it’s not much of a factor as they were both rather close to the percent received from foreign and domestic profits. Neither genre is that much popular than the other, neither one gains a that much larger of an audience than the other.

Looking at the entire thing as a whole, there a few to no advantages between the two except one eyesore of a disadvantage for the superhero genre that causes it to struggle in comparison. If the superhero genre wants to compete with the animation genre, in terms of turnover percentage, it needs to work on reducing their production budget, I get movies like Captain America: Civil War that has a large cast of big-name actors will be expensive, but these movie studios need to make cuts in some areas and get a little more creative as we saw in Deadpool — which had a fifth of the budget due to Fox providing them with small portion of funds. This is the only real difference that I can find that brings the superhero genre below the animation genre.

I’m going to add a few 2017 numbers to the picture that actually shows the opposite of what we have seen in the past — these numbers won’t be entirely accurate due to some of these movies recently coming out. For the Superhero genre: Wonder Woman, Logan, Thor: Ragnarok, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Coming in first for turnover percentage is Logan with 636%, then Wonder Woman with 552%, next Thor: Ragnarok with 439%, and lastly Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 with 432%. For a weak animation line up: Despicable Me 3, Coco, and The Boss Baby. Despicable Me 3 has an outstanding turnover percentage with 1290%, with a huge drop off we have The Boss Baby with 399%, and Coco clearly in last (was released on Nov. 22, 2017) with 88%. As I said before the numbers aren’t showing up the same as they have in the past for the animation genre, but it was rather weak this year with very few animations being released except for one big name and that was Despicable Me 3 which did very well, as expected.

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