Apatow Attack

Box Office Mojo has a matchup of all the recent Judd Aptow films: 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, Knocked Up, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and the new Pineapple Express. Check out the production budgets for each and their box office totals (domestic).

1. 40-Year-Old Budget. Production budget ($26m). Box Office: $109m
2. Knocked Up. Production budget ($30m). Box Office: $149m
3. Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Production budget ($30m). Box Office: $63m
4 . Superbad. Production budget ($20m). Box Office: $121m
5. Pineapple Express. Production budget ($30m). Box Office: ???

The worst of these was FSM, which only doubled the production budget. That's already probably in the top 1 percentile of movies in any year in terms of their return on investment.

The real key is that Apatow's movies are low cost comedies that have a big draw to girls and boys, young and old, and have a big life on the big screen and the secondary markets of DVD, etc. You figure that out, and you're rich. Movies like his will continue to get made as I'm sure many distributors are looking for safer films that can have a high probability of earning a good return on investment, and so they want more of these in their portfolio.

But in the longrun, I wonder how many of these Apatow can crank out. Part of the secret is that his actors are relative new comers - old friends and colleagues from his "Freaks and Geeks" days. But they're growing, making big bucks thanks to him and these films. Steve Carrell is probably just in too high of demand to go back to making many more Apatow films, though I wouldn't be surprised if he showed up again one day. But, you would think that the members of his troupe will be expecting pay raises if they keep making him money like this, making it more difficult to keep costs down for future Apatow produced films.