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No, Brokeback Mountain has probably about broken even. That's just a guess, but production costs just include making the film. Marketing is not included. On Boxoffice Mojo, they list these costs IF the studio releases them. Generally, the rule of thumb is that marketing a movie costs about 1/2 the total cost of the movie. On Brokeback, they have not released the marketing costs. I believe this is because this movie was never intended to make money. I never watch channels that would have an audience remotely interested in Brokeback, but for several weeks I thought I was being saturation bombed with ads. A movie like this, following standard Hollywood accounting, SHOULD have had around a 7 million advertising and marketing budget. I suspect they spent as much on this as they did on Shrek, which had a production cost of $60 million and marketing costs of $45 million.

If you compare it to a successful independent film, consider "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". It had production costs of $5 million, marketing $19 million (most after word of mouth had already made it a hit), and generated $241 mil. domestically and another $127 mil. internationally, for a total of $368 mil.

Of course, the Passion of the Christ is not only the top grossing R movie of all time, but the top grossing independent movie of all time, generating over $600 mil world wide on a $30 mil production and $25 mil. marketing campaign.

The success of this movie on any level is almost entirely hype. It's a smash because Roger Ebert, Hollywood, and the left coast homo and metrosexuals decided that it was a smash, and they weren't going to let poor box office results stand in the way of it being declared a smash.

You are exactly right. Hollywood will NEVER release the marketing costs of this movie, it is pure propaganda and as such it is the agenda that matters, not profits.

Hollywood knows perfectly well how to make a movie that will be a blockbuster, but this wasn't designed to be one of them. That is why they did not use "A List" actors, etc.