Joe Roth has risen again to be one of Hollywood’s most prolific producers, so it’s easy to forget that he undertook one of the most disastrous studio ventures in recent times with Revolution Studios.
TheWrap obtained the confidential financial documents given to prospective buyers of the Revolution library, which has been for sale since 2008.
The documents tell the story of a bygone, free-spending decade in Hollywood, when Roth paid big money to stars for movies that audiences no longer wanted to see, among them "Mona Lisa Smile," "Hollywood Homicide" and "Rent."
“I would do everything differently,” Roth told TheWrap when called about the library documents. “Our model -- what we were asked to do, and agreed to do -- was 6, 7, 8 movies a year. I didn’t have a big enough company to do that. I would have been better off working on a few movies, bigger titles, than doing a piece of Sony’s slate.”
Also read: Joe Roth Reflects on Revolution: ‘I Would Do Everything Differently’
That, of course, is what Roth has gone on to do since winding down Revolution at the end of 2007, making huge hits mainly for Disney: "Alice in Wonderland" with Tim Burton, and the upcoming “Oz: The Great and Powerful” and Universal's “Snow White and the Huntsman.”
But first, a lot of money was lost along the way. As an object lesson, the story of Revolution is instructive: 46 films, from “Gigli” to “Black Hawk Down,” costing a staggering $2.6 billion to produce, according to the documents. (The budgets are consistently higher than what was publicly acknowledged, though that is a well-worn Hollywood tradition.)
The movies yielded $3.7 billion in worldwide box office, which any movie executive will tell you is a dismal return on investment. For starters, approximately half of the sum goes to exhibitors.
Also read: The Secret Summit Prospectus: $1.2B Projected for ‘Breaking Dawn’
The company was certainly hurt by declining home-entertainment revenue, starting in the middle of the decade. But the documents show that spending was high on movies that, one 
after the other, yielded a thin box-office return.
>> Julie Taymor’s Beatles tribute “Across the Universe” was made for $70.8 million, but netted less than $30 million worldwide.
>> Family comedy “Zoom” with Tim Allen playing a former superhero was produced for $75.6 million, but yielded a mere $12 million worldwide.
>> And who could forget “Gigli,” the $75.6 million Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck turkey that became the new standard for a box office disaster? That one eked out less than $7.7 million.
When Roth launched Revolution, the New York Times reported that his goal was to make movies that were “inexpensive and entertaining.” And he raised nearly $1 billion to fund his ambitious venture.
