Every genre with a real sample in a catalogue of 74,571 films, ranked by what it returns on its production budget. Horror leads. Animation does not.
Horror sits well above the rest, which will surprise nobody who has watched a studio greenlight a haunted house film on the strength of a good title and a cast willing to work for very little. The genre's return over budget makes almost everything else in the table look embarrassed to be there, and it does this repeatedly, not as some lucky fluke that happened once and got mythologised in a trade paper. Meanwhile the big, effects-heavy tentpole genres cluster together in a way that suggests everyone is quietly copying everyone else's homework, chasing the same crowd with the same spectacle and getting a return that, relative to what went in, is respectable rather than remarkable. It is the sort of pattern that should temper any executive's confidence about "what audiences want", given that what the numbers actually reward is restraint married to a decent hook, not scale for its own sake.
The wider spread across the table is the real story, and it is a much wider gap than the industry's collective self-assurance would imply. Some genres form a group that barely moves no matter how you slice the underlying pool, plodding along with a consistency that is almost admirable, while others swing about with the nervous energy of a executive who has just seen a rival studio's opening weekend. None of this stops anyone from speaking about their slate with total conviction, as though return on budget were a solved problem rather than something that behaves, on this evidence, a bit like the weather: broadly patterned, individually unpredictable, and stubbornly resistant to whatever anyone in a boardroom is certain about this quarter.
The ranking
| Genre | Films | Median return | Lost money | Median budget |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Horror | 499 | 210% | 24% | $5.5M |
| Documentary | 65 | 194% | 29% | $3.0M |
| Adventure | 1,061 | 96% | 32% | $20M |
| Comedy | 2,797 | 86% | 32% | $9.0M |
| Action | 2,777 | 82% | 31% | $22M |
| Drama | 2,026 | 54% | 39% | $7.0M |
| Crime | 755 | 39% | 42% | $9.5M |
| Biography | 611 | 33% | 41% | $15M |
| Animation | 88 | 7% | 49% | $6.5M |
Median return on production budget by primary genre. Films carrying both a budget above $100,000 and a worldwide gross above $100,000 (n = 10,829). Genres with fewer than 60 qualifying films are omitted.
What the loss column is doing there
The median is a middle, not a promise. A genre can lead the table and still bury most of the money put into it, which is why the share that failed to return its budget sits next to the median rather than in a footnote. Read the two columns together or do not read them at all.
The films behind the top row
| Film | Budget | Worldwide | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Gallows (2015) | $0.1M | $43M | 430x |
| Night of the Living Dead (1968) | $0.1M | $30M | 265x |
| The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) | $0.1M | $31M | 221x |
| Halloween (1978) | $0.3M | $70M | 216x |
| Friday the 13th (1980) | $0.6M | $60M | 109x |
| The Devil Inside (2012) | $1.0M | $102M | 102x |
| The Quiet Ones (2014) | $0.2M | $18M | 89x |
| Saw (2004) | $1.2M | $104M | 87x |
The highest returns in Horror, the genre leading the table above, shown as a multiple of production budget.
And the ones the median hides
| Film | Budget | Worldwide | Return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pulse (2001) | $25M | $0.3M | -99% |
| The Requin (2022) | $8.5M | $0.1M | -98% |
| Seed (2006) | $10M | $0.2M | -98% |
| Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) | $8.5M | $0.2M | -98% |
| Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever (2023) | $4.3M | $0.1M | -98% |
The same genre, sorted the other way. Every one of these is inside the cohort that produced the median at the top of this article.
Every genre above has its own page, with the films behind the number.
Every figure above is computed from the Hollywood Metrics catalogue of 74,571 films at the time of publication, with the sample size and the filters stated under each table. Nothing here is estimated, and nothing here is rounded to make a point. Read how we work or check our forecasting record.
