Merchandise-driven IP and star-fronted vehicles do not carry the same economic risk. Across 107 franchises in Artometrics' TidyTuesday media-franchise file — each clearing at least $4B lifetime — Pokémon leads at $91B, and merchandise, licensing, and retail account for 61% of revenue in the full dataset. When most of the money attaches to characters and products, a weak theatrical run is a line item, not an existential bet.
Jared Leto's six-film 2020s slate is the counterexample: worldwide gross ÷ reported budget ranges from 0.65x to 2.04x, and three of six titles land below breakeven — with no licensing layer to absorb the misses. The charts below pair that small case study with our published franchise and margins datasets to compare revenue structure, not scandal; conduct questions stay in The Protection Threshold. Methods and citations are in the back matter.
Merchandise Is the Insulation IP Franchises Have and Star Vehicles Don't
Artometrics' franchise-revenue report established that merchandise is not one revenue stream among several — it is the dominant one, at 61% of everything tracked across 107 franchises earning at least $4B lifetime. Pokémon's $91B total, the highest of any tracked property, was built almost entirely on cards, games, and retail rather than any theatrical run. Henry Jenkins's transmedia framework (Convergence Culture, NYU Press, 2006) helps explain why: revenue attached to a character or mascot can move across games, apparel, and film without routing through a single performer's weekend gross. Contrast that with a franchise or vehicle built around one performer's draw. When merchandise, licensing, and games are absent or minor, the entire revenue case rests on box office and, downstream, on home video and streaming licensing tied to that same theatrical result. There is no secondary economy running in parallel the way there is for Pokémon or, per the same report, for Star Wars — the one franchise in that dataset the report specifically flagged as fully diversified across box office, merchandise, home video, and games. A star-fronted film without that diversification is, in revenue-structure terms, closer to a single bet than to a franchise.
What Concentrated Star Risk Looks Like: A Six-Film Case Study
The case-study dataset is small and deliberately narrow: six of actor Jared Leto's 2020s film credits, each expressed as worldwide gross divided by reported production budget, using trade-reported budget bands from Box Office Mojo. House of Gucci (2021, ensemble) returned 2.04x on a $75M budget. Morbius (2022, lead) returned 2.02x on $83M. Those two clear breakeven with room. The other four sit closer to the line or under it: The Little Things (2021, lead, released into a pandemic-narrowed theatrical window) landed at 1.03x; Haunted Mansion (2023, ensemble) at 0.79x; Masters of the Universe (2026, supporting) at 0.66x; and Tron: Ares (2025, lead) at 0.65x, on the largest reported budget in the slate at $220M. Read individually, each figure is a data point about one film. Read as a slate, the pattern is a distribution centered near or below 1.0x rather than comfortably above it — half the titles below breakeven, and only two of six clearing 2.0x. That is the shape of concentrated star risk: revenue tied tightly to one theatrical outcome per title, with no licensing or merchandise base underneath it the way Pokémon's $91B or Star Wars' diversified mix has. When a title in this kind of slate underperforms, the studio absorbs the loss directly — there is no secondary revenue stream to blunt it. This is a small, non-random sample, and the report treats it as illustration, not proof; see Limitations below.
Why Genre and Cast Metadata Can Mislead Single-Title Conclusions
Artometrics' margins report already demonstrated a caution that applies directly here: community-cleaned genre and metadata tags in box-office tables are unreliable enough to mislead a reader trying to draw conclusions about any single title or person. That report's dataset, nominally tagged "horror," was topped by Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace at $474,544,677 domestic — a science-fiction adventure film, not a horror film, sitting atop a genre-labeled table because of a tagging error in the community-cleaned merge. The median across all 3,401 films in that file was $25,533,818 domestic, spanning 1936–2019. The lesson generalizes beyond genre tags: any table that mixes lead, supporting, and ensemble billing, or that blends pandemic-window releases with ordinary theatrical runs, risks producing headline numbers that look like a verdict on one person when they are really an artifact of how the underlying rows were labeled and merged. The six-film case study above mixes exactly those roles — lead, supporting, and ensemble — and one pandemic-era release. That mix is disclosed, not hidden, because the margins report's central caution is that undisclosed metadata quietly drives conclusions readers think are about content, when they are really about cleaning decisions.
LIMITATIONS
Six films is a small sample. It cannot generalize to "all star vehicles" or to any actor's career as a whole, and it should not be read as a ranking or grade of any individual film. The gross-to-budget ratios use trade-reported budget bands, which studios do not always disclose precisely or consistently; treat them as order-of-magnitude figures, not audited production accounting. No causal link between reputational risk and box-office softness is established, tested, or claimed in this report — the framework below is an editorial hypothesis about revenue structure, not a measured finding, and is labeled as such. The franchise and horror datasets describe different populations (107 large franchises; 3,401 individual films) and different time windows; combining them illustrates a structural argument, not a single unified statistical model.
Conclusion
Editorial framework, not measured finding: the evidence assembled here is consistent with the idea that merchandise-driven IP carries structurally less exposure to any one person's performance than a star-fronted vehicle does. The six-film case study illustrates concentrated theatrical exposure when that cushion is absent — not proof about any particular result. De Vany and Walls (2004) show why theatrical outcomes alone behave like lottery tickets; this report asks whether merchandise share is the hedge studios buy when they want something sturdier than a lottery ticket. A future report with a larger sample could test whether merchandise share predicts how much a single underperforming title costs the studio that owns it.
Data, methods & sources
Data and method
This report combines two previously published Artometrics analyses with one small case-study dataset assembled for this piece. It introduces no new franchise-level or film-level dataset of its own.
First, the TidyTuesday 2019 media-franchise revenue dataset (107 franchises, each with at least $4B in lifetime revenue as of mid-2019), as analyzed in Artometrics' franchise report — source bundle: TidyTuesday 2019-07-02. Second, the TidyTuesday horror-tagged box-office dataset (3,401 films, 1936–2019), as analyzed in Artometrics' margins report. Both figures are cited here exactly as published in those reports; no recalculation was performed on either source file for this piece.
Third, a case-study table of six Jared Leto credits in the 2020s: worldwide gross and trade-reported production budget from Box Office Mojo, with gross ÷ budget as a simple derived ratio. The synthesis connecting all three — merchandise insulation versus concentrated theatrical exposure — is an editorial reading, not a unified statistical model, and is labeled as such throughout.
References
Editor's note
This report is a cross-report synthesis: it cites facts already published in two Artometrics data reports and layers them against a small, separately sourced case-study dataset. It does not re-derive or re-audit the underlying TidyTuesday files, and it does not address personal-conduct questions about any individual named in it — that ground is covered separately in "The Protection Threshold: When Flops End Hollywood's Silence." This piece is limited to box-office and franchise-revenue economics.
This report was researched, written, and produced in active collaboration with Claude AI (Anthropic), following the same disclosed process used across Artometrics reporting: human editorial judgment directs the research question and framework; execution — analysis, prose, and chart design — is a documented collaboration.
— Artometrics Editorial