The Scoreboard: March 28, 2026
Ten films. $1.48 billion in combined worldwide revenue. Two are printing money. Two are hemorrhaging it. The rest are somewhere in between, and the data tells a more interesting story than the headlines.
| # | Film | WW Gross | Budget | ROI | TMDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Revenant | $533.0M | $135M | +295% | 7.5 |
| 2 | Hoppers | $248.6M | $150M | +66% | 7.6 |
| 3 | Project Hail Mary | $223.2M | $200M | +12% | 8.2 |
| 4 | Scream 7 | $194.7M | $45M | +333% | 5.8 |
| 5 | Dhurandhar | $140.0M | $22M | +522% | 7.9 |
| 6 | Reminders of Him | $54.0M | $30M | +80% | 7.1 |
| 7 | The King's Warden | $39.0M | $7M | +465% | 7.5 |
| 8 | The Bride! | $23.2M | $80M | -71% | 6.3 |
| 9 | Ready or Not: Here I Come | $14.5M | $14M | +3% | 7.6 |
| 10 | How to Make a Killing | $7.1M | $40M | -82% | 7.0 |
The Winners
Dhurandhar: The Quiet Monster
If you are not paying attention to Dhurandhar: The Revenge, the data says you should be. A $22 million Indian action-thriller has generated $140 million worldwide for a 522% ROI. That is the highest return on investment of any film currently in theaters, and it is not close.
At 7.9 on TMDB, audience reception is excellent. This is the kind of film our model flags as a "quiet outperformer": low budget, genre audience, strong word-of-mouth, minimal marketing spend eating into margins. The playbook that Blumhouse perfected, executed by a different market entirely.
The King's Warden: $7M to $39M
A $7 million budget turning into $39 million is a 465% return. No stars. No franchise. Just a well-executed genre film finding its audience. Our database shows that films in the $5-10M budget range with 7.0+ TMDB scores have a median ROI of 180%. The King's Warden is running at 2.5x the median. That is a genuine outlier.
Scream 7: The Machine Keeps Running
Scream 7 at $194.7M on a $45M budget is a 333% return. The franchise has now generated over $900M cumulative worldwide across seven installments. The 5.8 TMDB score is the lowest in the franchise, but horror sequels do not need critical acclaim. They need a floor, and Scream has one built from two decades of brand recognition.
The Losers
How to Make a Killing: -82% ROI
$40 million budget. $7.1 million gross. That is a $33 million loss before marketing spend. The 7.0 TMDB score suggests the film is not terrible. Audiences who see it like it. The problem is that nobody is seeing it. This is a distribution and marketing failure, not a quality failure. Our model calls this pattern "invisible good film" and it is one of the most frustrating outcomes in the data.
The Bride!: -71% ROI
$80 million budget, $23.2 million returned. At 6.3 TMDB, audiences are lukewarm. The data pattern here is different from How to Make a Killing. This is not an invisible film. People know about it. They are choosing not to go. A 6.3 audience score on an $80M budget is a recipe for exactly this outcome.
The One to Watch
Project Hail Mary: +12% ROI (So Far)
At $223.2M worldwide against a $200M budget, Project Hail Mary is technically profitable but barely. The 8.2 TMDB score is the highest of any film currently in theaters. Sci-fi films with 8.0+ scores in our database average a 2.8x opening-to-total multiplier. If that holds, we are looking at a $395M domestic finish and $700M+ worldwide. The legs will determine whether this is a modest hit or a massive one.
Next week's box office report will tell us whether the second-weekend hold confirms the legs thesis or whether front-loading killed the multiplier.
The Takeaway
The market is healthy. $1.48 billion across 10 films with two genuine ROI monsters (Dhurandhar at 522%, King's Warden at 465%) and only two losers. The data shows that budget does not predict success: the highest ROI film cost $22M and the biggest loser cost $80M. Quality, audience targeting, and word-of-mouth remain the only reliable predictors.
Data sourced from TMDB, cross-referenced with Hollywood Metrics' 20,000-film database. ROI calculations exclude marketing spend (typically 50-100% of production budget for wide releases).