Now that Spectre's sitting comfortably on top of both the Irish and international box office, it's already smashed through Skyfall's records and is comfortably on its way to being one of the biggest films of the year.

After just two weeks of release, Spectre's made $289 million at the international box office with $70 million of that coming from the US box office alone. However, it's still a long, LONG way off making back its money - let alone breaking even.

One report suggests that Spectre needs to make a whopping $650 million worldwide in order to pay back its production budget, marketing and distributor fees.

The breakdown, as far as we're aware, has it that the production budget is $250 million with $150 million for advertising and another $100 million going to distributors and ancillary costs.

We're guessing all those destroyed Aston Martins cost a few bob, as well. As it stands right now, Spectre is expected to just about make back that figure - but just barely.

Skyfall, by the end of its run, made $1.1 billion on its estimated production budget of $200 million. Not only that, almost a third of that budget - $29 million, to be precise - was made up from those lucrative product placement deals. Remember that scene when Bond is off lying in a hut drinking a suspiciously well-focused bottle of Heineken? Product placement.

$650 million might seem like an insane amount of money - and it is - but nowadays, that's par for the course when it comes to major franchises like Bond.

As many industry experts and financial types have said, it's only going to take two or three major franchises to fail massively at the box office for the whole franchise model to collapse.

Judging by Spectre's take so far and the current box office trends, that's a long way off yet.

 

Via Variety