How ‘The Northman’ became profitable despite coming short at box office

The Northman may have been a box office failure but it was recently revealed that the film was still able to make its money back.

Robert Egger’s The Northman, his third feature film, was praised by critics but was unable to make its money back at the box office.

The film was Egger’s first movie outside of the production company A24, known for its focus on smaller indie films. The Northman was instead produced by Focus Feature, who recently reported the film was still able to make its money back.

Focus Feature president of production and acquisitions, Kiska Higgs, recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about exactly how the film was able to do that.

“The Northman was among Focus’ splashier and more expensive recent features, but sadly didn’t do as well as had been hoped at the box office. Were any lessons learned from that?”

“This has been spoken about before, but it actually ended up being a win for us financially. There was a special set of circumstances about the theatrical release, plus PVOD. I know in the press it hasn’t been lauded as a success, but it was OK for us in the end. There are additional ways for us to monetize things, at least for us at Universal. It was one we shared with New Regency, and we weren’t really front and center on production of that. But lessons definitely have been learned from a creative perspective, but I don’t look back and think we could have done anything differently, because there were so many … Vikings in the boat.”

“When Focus has a more expensive title that doesn’t perform all that spectacularly, does that have a knock-on effect on how much you can spend on other films?”

“I sort of love the idea of saying “no” and then getting a call from some dark tower somewhere saying, “What do you mean?” But genuinely it is the amazing thing of being part of NBCUniversal. And also just the pure economics of it means we can make almost anything work. We’re extremely responsible in how we greenlight films and how we make them. And, frankly, how we market and release them, too. We take big swings for sure, but they’re still calculated. And across the slate, everything comes out in the wash. We’ve had some very successful years, and I’d love to take credit for those. But most of it is because we’re just part of this huge steam engine that does Minions on top of Brian and Charles. I was actually trying to pitch a Minions/Downton Abbey crossover. I don’t know why someone hasn’t taken me up on that. “

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