The Economics of Scarface

How did Scarface, a movie that flopped in 1983 and got savaged by critics, quietly become the only fortune to survive the cocaine economy it was about?

In this video, we break down the complete economics of Scarface: the twelve-billion-dollar real drug economy the film reached into, the twenty-five-million-dollar movie that got written off as a flop, and how home video, hip-hop, and forty years of catalog turned that flop into a perpetual, legal fortune.

Discover how, by nineteen eighty, roughly seventy percent of the cocaine and marijuana entering the United States came through South Florida; how the DEA put the Miami drug trade at an estimated twelve billion dollars a year, outrunning real estate and tourism, the region’s two biggest legal industries, each on its own; and how the Federal Reserve’s Miami branch reported a cash surplus of around five billion dollars, more than every other branch in the country combined. See why screenwriter Oliver Stone left the country for Paris to finish the script clean, how producer Martin Bregman fought the film’s X rating and won the appeal eighteen votes to two, and why a reported twenty-five-million-dollar production that took in about forty-five million at home and roughly sixty-five point seven million worldwide was still treated as a disappointment. Then watch the afterlife arrive: the home-video and cable resurrection, hip-hop’s adoption of “The World Is Yours,” the 2006 video game that sold more than a million copies in its first couple of months and better than two million over its life, and four decades of catalog and merchandise Universal has never fully disclosed.