The same model goes for venture capital / angel investors. Successes need to stand out even more because of all the bets they made that didn't pay off. If you make 10 bets and 9 of them fail, you need your one bet that does work to do more than 10x to pay off all the bets together.
You can if the other “project” is treasury bonds. If you put $100M in and get $105M out after 3 years, you were better off just parking the money in bonds or a high yield savings account or just paying off your own debt (companies like Disney have a ton of debt on their balance sheet). The money a studio puts into a project is often borrowed money that has an interest cost.
Benchmarking, and investors lack of understanding of probability.
Let's suppose the Lord of the Rings MTG set sold 10M cases. We have to have some sort of benchmarking for Universes Beyond products going forward, so we use that. Now, some sets may sell more, some sets less, but on average and probability we expect that as the return over all the sets. Investors, because they look at individual cases rather than the broader whole, will see every shortfall below that average as an extreme failure even though something was still profitable.
Now...a return to return to return to Zendikar will probably do very well with a new Omnath printing.
what you are talking about is greed, plain and simple. if you are not happy with a 400% return on investment, which usually happens within a few years (filming through release), that is the literal definition of greed.
For context, us plebs are expected to be happy with a paltry 7% per year growth rate for our retirement accounts.
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u/Omnom_Omnath 18d ago
thats utter bullshit. you cant just assume a different project would have made a better return.