According to wired, [0] Disney paid Lucas Arts $4.5B, which half was cash.
In 2016, [1] The Force Awakens made $1.54B globally. Maybe it's more now.
Lets say that the last Jedi manages the same success? Well, they made their money back and the new rumored trilogy. That's profit.
When you can put Spiderman and the X-men in the same universe as the Avengers and do the next 20 or 30 super hero movies where one, two, three, four, etc characters from the universe makes an appearance?
I'm pretty sure fans of whatever franchise will line up to throw money in seeing the movies.
Your math is impeccable. But I do wonder if someone is considering the possibility that people will get tired of superhero movies in the relatively near future and the whole concept will seem dated.
It really doesn't matter because right now the MCU is a money printing machine and the lack of certain characters is a big pain point for some of the most dedicated fans, so they still have quite a bit of stream left.
Movies continue to make money for years after they are released.
It’s indicative of how big a hit the movie is. They get a chunk of every toy, birthday hat, blanket, clothing item, etc that has Star Wars stamped on it.
The first few weeks mostly goes to the distributor, the longer it is in theater the more money the theaters make off of it, which is why Titanic was such a big deal for theaters.
The X-Men franchise is the 7th highest grossing movie franchise of all time, bringing in almost 5 billion USD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films. Add that to the 13.5 billion for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and you can see how valuable this can be.
Admittedly Marvel was just a fraction of the equation. There's the Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age, Peanuts, Dr. Seuss, and soon Ferdinand) and the distribution rights to other tons of other films. I've been hearing report that Fox is keeping the rights to specific classic films and all music rights. But the music will be licensed out to Disney for practically nothing.
