There’s a much better actual ceiling example: special editions of Star Wars. New Hope finished 1997in 7/8th place with an inflation adjusted gross (for 2019) of ~270M.

Empire strikes back finished in 20th place with a 2019 inflation adjustment of ~130M.

The hypothetical ceiling of a re release/ directors cut is high enough to Pass something like Dune even if Snyderverse/ZSJL wasn’t the universally beloved vehicle to do it.

exorcist 2000

That’s still 100M domestic in adjusted terms. That’s what Lion King made in a 3D re release in 2011. Of course the other big re releases in 2012 only made around 40-50M. I just don’t see a “10%” rule of thumb working versus a more generic baseline for this sort of work.

I’m not saying the Snyder cut should have done anything specific but the ceiling for re releases/directors cuts.it’s a genuinely interesting question and you could go either way. It’s a bit of a middling result but you can easily interpret that positively. That’s how I initially viewed it even if more data points are making me feel more skeptical

It’s a weird unicorn we lack easy comps for. We’d need pure dvd sales for something approximating a useful comp (eg stuff like kingdom of heaven).

It’s also with flagging that WB wouldn’t have approved spending 60M on this directors cut if they didn’t see upside relative to investing in a random mid budget original film (which is what Netflix did with army of the dead).