45.4 million was how much Hocus Pocus made in 1993.
28 million dollars is the budget.
Today, after nearly 30 years a sequel was made, but why did it take so long?
First up, the first one lost money in theaters.
28 million was the budget.
General rule is marketing is 50% the budget, so likely the total costs were 42 million.
45 million in theaters, which take 45% of the gross.
That’d present a case the movie lost initially about 14 million dollars.
But there was a recovery after the theaters.
8.2 million watched the 25th anniversary special for the movie on Freeform in 2018.
The movie grew as a Halloween classic and brought in over 50 million dollars in VHS/DVD sales post theater release.
Not even factoring in costumes, merchandise and syndication revenue from other networks, it made a profit.
That brings it back to the second reason for the wait, the cast was busy.
Sarah Jessica Parker had Sex in the City come out in 1998, where she ended up making over a million per episode. Due to the work, she also avoided movies, where from 1998 to 2010, she only did four movies, two of them being Sex in the City.
Kathy Najimy also did pretty well, being in over 20 movies since Hocus Pocus, doing 67 episodes of Veronica’s Closet and 257 episodes of King of the Hill.
Bette Midler, who was the biggest star in the first one is the only one who had a lot of availability, but it looks like that was intentional, where she had a semi retirement.
To get these three actresses would cost easily over a million each and that’s probably conservative.
This makes it so a sequel to get done would need an increased budget, where it could be something like 50 million dollars.
Which is why Disney likely didn’t want to give it a stamp for a theater release.
Theatrically, it was still a box office failure and there’s not a lot of evidence to correlate TV or VHS success to theaters.
They also had actresses who’d not price wise fit with a made for TV movie.
That was until Disney+, where visibly the goal is giving theatrical budgets to TV content, with examples such as WandaVision at 25 million an episode.
That’s the reason for the 29 year wait, from a guy who has never even seen the original.