Matt Damon’s white-savior film The Great Wall bombed in North America. It debuted at third place in its opening weekend (coming in behind Lego Batman and Fifty Shades Darker), and at this point, the movie will probably barely rack up $40-45 million in the North American box office. At first, people thought that the Asian market would make up for the North American loss, because it was on track to make at least $200 million in China and other Asian countries. But probably not. Plus, even if the film makes $300 million overall, the studios (both American and Chinese) probably won’t be able to recoup their money. The Hollywood Reporter has more (and the math is sort of confusing):

The collapse of The Great Wall at the domestic box office (it has made $34.8 million in North America) has iced any notion of a significant future for U.S.-China co-productions. The movie likely will end up with losses of more than $75 million, sources say, and Universal Pictures will be on the hook for at least $10 million.

The studio funded about 25 percent of the film’s $150 million production budget, the rest coming in equal parts from Legendary Entertainment, China Film Group and Le Vision Pictures. But Universal also covered Wall’s global marketing expenses, conservatively estimated at $80 million-plus. The film earned $171 million in China (a disappointment) and is expected to top out at about $320 million globally. That’s way less than investors had anticipated for the biggest-ever U.S.-China co-production. “The fusion of the No. 1 and No. 2 movie markets in the world will eventually happen, but it is a misfire, domestically speaking,” says box-office analyst Jeff Bock. Adds one Hollywood executive who has dealt extensively with China, “There’s no question but that it’s a failure.”

The good news for Universal is that its share of this failure will be relatively modest. The studio gets to collect a roughly 10 percent distribution fee from all theatrical revenue (between 40 percent and 50 percent of the total box office), and box-office rentals likely will recoup much, if not all, of its marketing outlay before other investors dip into whatever money is left to cut into production costs. The four partners will split any further theatrical income equally. If the movie generates hoped-for ancillary revenue (including $20 million from domestic home entertainment and as much as $40 million from international home entertainment, with $25 million to $30 million from TV — admittedly, a best-case scenario), that will further stanch the red ink.

Still, the crumbling of this Wall has toppled much hope for major Sino-American pictures. Among the lessons insiders have learned are the difficulties of finding stories that meld Eastern and Western characters and the challenges of blending crews, which in Wall’s case meant hiring 100 interpreters and solving conflicts that allegedly took place among some below-the-line workers.

“This was the first movie of its type,” says one executive connected to the project. “You’re trying to appeal to everyone, and you’re not compelling enough to appeal to anyone. It feels like Esperanto.”

To date, the studios have viewed officially sanctioned China co-productions with skepticism, even though they offer vastly greater financial benefits, enabling backers to pocket 43 percent of ticket-sale revenue out of the country, far more than non-co-productions allow. Past tentpoles, such as Paramount’s Transformers: Age of Extinction and Disney’s Iron Man 3, were briefly planned as co-prods before their producers realized the depth of Chinese involvement and script control.

[From THR]

From what I can figure out, the American companies get paid first and the Chinese backers get paid with whatever’s left, which means that the best case scenario for everyone involved with The Great Wall is that every party simply breaks even. Seriously though, why would anyone think that spending this kind of money was a good idea? You don’t spend $150 million on a production and then $80-100 million on promotion for something you’re not sure will work. Besides that, no one from China OR America thought to ask themselves “Hey, are we making a movie where Matt Damon saves China???” As for the “formula” of trying to make a financially successful movie with a blended cast and crew and an inoffensive storyline… yeah, I have no idea. But let’s cross The Great Wall’s formula off the list, okay?

Photos courtesy of WENN, ‘The Great Wall’ stills.