With regard to the finances:
Ghostbusters (2016) cost $144m. Modern rule of thumb dictates you double that for marketing, so $288m to break-even, which is pretty much what THR reported (they said $300m). The movie made $229m of that at the worldwide box office, in theaters. TheNumbers.com has DVD sales numbers into March 2017 and Blu-ray sales numbers into January 2017, and lists $38m in revenue:
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Ghost ... ideo-sales So that alone gets the movie to $267m, and that's without
any merch (I cannot find it now, but I heard $50m for merch alone -- here is an article where
just Mattel says sales "exceeded expectations":
https://variety.com/2016/film/news/matt ... 201820557/),
any foreign Blu-ray or DVD sales (If America alone did $38m, the rest of the world surely did at least $10m, and do The Numbers' numbers account for the 4K UHD combo packs?), digital sales, digital
and physical rentals, cable deals, etc. I understand not wanting to paint a failure as a success, but I really think it's easy to see that the movie would have closed that gap, especially given many of those numbers are still going up today, albeit in very small increments. I fully agree that the film was
not a financial win, but I also really don't think there's any doubt it broke even.
Also, as Sony said, the loss
is covered anyway. As much as Sony also wanted the new movie to be a success in order to add to the possible revenue streams, the big benefit of making a new movie in an old franchise is you get to re-market the old one. I'm not saying this money goes in the
Ghostbusters (2016) column, but even if you want to bet against all of those other elements filling in the remaining $21m, the studio ends up satisfied regardless because the existence of the new movie no doubt caused thousands of people to buy a new edition of the original two movies, or the cartoon, or any of the hundreds of pieces of 1984 or general series merchandise that hit the market.