So...Paranormal Activity is doing quite well, by all accounts. ‘Accounts’ being the operative word here. Still, the profitability issue is always a thorny one, and perhaps nowhere more so than in movieland.

Can we really adjust effectively for inflation? Are we talking box office gross, or ROI (return of investment)?

What if your backers only put down £20,000 for shooting, but the publishers whiffed an indie hit and spent millions on marketing - does that disqualify you? If not, exactly whose ‘profits’ are we talking about anyway?

In reality then, it doesn’t ever boil down to a straightforward incomings-minus-outgoings equation. But, either way, these are ten films you probably should’ve stumped up for a few shares in...

10. Titanic (1997)

The Sums: Ok, so this one’s controversial right off the bat. It may well be the highest-grossing box office release of all time (a handy argument next time you’re chastised for a minor spoiler?), but it became so on the back of a budget that actually made the universe itself feel smaller.

A $1.8bn - yes, BILLION - dollar return on a $200m budget doesn’t even come within an iceberg’s width of the all-time ROI charts. Still, the fact remains that $1.8bn is quite a lot of money. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Why So Profitable? Good question - as we see above, this one isn’t attributable to some quirk of indie economics. Must be our insatiable appetite for disaster porn combined with a brace of much-loved A-listers, then...

Alternatively, it could be down to some sense of global economic pulling-together over anything costing as much as Titanic did. If it had bombed, large areas of the planet would probably have had to shut down for a couple of months until we clawed our collective way back into the black.

Who Got Rich? James Cameron was crowned King Of The World in a small private ceremony.

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