How much did it make?
Of course the budget was over $4mil, which was huge in that era of filmmaking, but how did it pan out $ wise?
shareThis film cost $3.8 million, so expensive that it made no profit on its first release. (Found in the "trivia" section for this film.
I finally got to watch The Aviator tonight and it fueled my interest in Hughes.... I found this tidbit on a bio site about him...
"Following the summer of 1924, Howard and Ella moved to Hollywood to pursue Howard's interest in making movies. When his first attempt failed, he hired Noah Dietrich to head the movie subsidiary of his tool company, and Lewis Mileston as director. The new team won an academy award for Two Arabian Nights (1928). Their next film, Hell's Angels (1930), written and directed by Hughes and starring Jean Harlow, was the most expensive movie of its time at a cost of $3.8 million. This movie, about World War I aviators, lost $1.5 million at the box office but allowed Hughes to indulge his interest in flying."
But then I got to thinking... How much is that in today's dollar... So I searched...
$3.8 million in 1930 would be about $45 Million in today's dollars... The amount the movie cost...
$1.5 million would be about $17.5 million in today's dollar... The amout he lost...
So compared with today's movies and how most of them flop and lose money, he did't do bad... Not to mention when he died in '76 he was worth $2 billion... That's nearly $7 billion in today's dollars...
Obviously, your source for the rate of inflation is way off.
shareI'm replying in 2022 to a post from 2014, which in turn is replying to a post from 2005...
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
$3.8 million in 1930 is equivalent to $65.5 million in 2022.
And the dude from 2005 was correct with $45 million...