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Disney Reveals Doctor Strange 2 Cost $290M, $100 Million More Than estimated in trades
Film Budget
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Scott Derrickson (Director of 'Doctor Strange'):
Guess it's more than 25% nowadays.
That’s just for regular movies. For tentpole blockbusters the amount of underreporting is even higher.
At this point. Is it even possible for a movie to actually make a profit
I get the feeling sometimes that if you did the 'standard' math you would come to the conclusion that studios can't actually afford to make movies.
If they didnt turn a profit in some way, they wouldn't make them. They are not making multiple Marvel movies a year because of artistic reasons.
They do, it's just not during the theatrical run.
Yes, but it has to be made for the target audience and it can't overblow the budget.
They could switch up their approach and try making a good movie. Top Gun killed it at the box office because they chose to not make Tom Cruise a broken bitter old man like Disney did to Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Willow, and Indiana Jones. Nobody wants to pay to see their heroes torn down.
Horror movies are the only ones doing well this year. From Winnie the pooh, terrifier 2, skinnamarink, smile, scream 6, and evil dead, they've all made money. Even popes exorcist did ok.
I'm predicting Talk To Me to make $100 million domestic
So what the hell does Dial of Destiny cost?
500m
I mean, Lucasfilm spent over $500M on producing each of the sequel trilogy films, so you may be correct. The Force Awakens alone cost $533.2M to produce, not including marketing costs.
A very good question. For the big tentpoles, I would add at least $100M to whatever the reported budget is, not including marketing costs.
As stated in the article, the UK's incentive system lets them recoup up to 25% of the costs.
If it shoots in Atlanta, Georgia, the state covers 20%. (At least I think that's how the U.S tax incentive systems usually are.)
The 290 is after the tax rebate. Before the tax break it was 340 million $
This isn't surprising. I'm sure studios feed trades low ball budget numbers all the time.
They have $200 million as the "standard" budget, then keep that as the official budget until someone does some digging.
Also with marketing it seems the standard is $100M, but no way so many different studios just happened to spend $100M. I suspect that one is even higher but they round down.
Yeah it makes no sense that basically all movies have that standard 200M$ budget stated so many times. Like why would they all cost basically the same?
Where the fuck did that money go though? DS2 looks bad, the scale is small and the sets look like a warehouse lined with green screen.
Reshoots.
MoM had reshoots. Above and beyond the normal kind that are planned for. They basically shot almost a second movie.
You’re right, I completely forgot that they had six weeks of reshoots in December
This is why I think The Flash has a way higher budget than just $220M.
Oh no question. When they revealed that $220m number, I laughed out loud. No bloody way it’s that low.
Vulture's reported Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 150M makes sense now.
All these movies probably cost more than they report.
I told everyone it costed more since they went through 5 re-shoots and people were pissed at me
200 is low?
I think they mean in comparison to what studios are blowing and also movies that started to film during the pandemic had massive bloat to their budgets.
The flash has been in pre-production since 2014 (depending on your definition of pre-production), add in the expense of COVID, yes that seems low.
The problem was COVID. Proper COVID procedure ballooned movies production costs, like 50 extra million dollars on average
They aren’t saying $220M is a low number. They’re saying The Flash’s budget has to be way higher than $220M
The marvels was delayed 5 times and reshot twice. That shit costs $300 million without a doubt.
The whole movie was filmed THREE times? That will surely be terrible
Nothing supports that claim honestly. The full plot leaked a long time ago and everything in the trailers and marketing supports that leak. It had some reshoots but that was likely due to delays and shifting where the film was in the timeline.
Flash and Indiana Jones 5 have both got to be in the $300 mil range. Just from all the production, waste, redos and overall inefficiency. You could almost watch the sunk cost fallacy take hold and snowball in real time over the past few years. If Dr Strange MoM was $290m without any major publicly known problems besides Covid, Flash and Indy had to be substantially more.
Dr Strange also had a director quit last minute
Didn’t The Flush go through Four, possibly Five directors?
Down the toilet it goes!
Ended up with Raimi though, and he has been known throughout his career at being really good at doing things with no money, because for Evil Dead and stuff, there wasn’t any money.
Worst run on sentence ever.
his Spider-Man 3 still is one of the most expensive movies tho
Wait. Dr strange had a change of directors and months of reshoots that basically changed the whole original movie plus covid... It had bunch of known production problems.
Change of directors and writers was before shooting.
But leaving aside the lockdowns, there was a bunch of stuff they intended to shoot in the US that they had to shoot in the UK due travel restrictions, and that wasn't cheap. When their Assembled show mentioned that most of the New York scenes were on a set they built in the UK because they couldn't move I thought that wouldn't be cheap.
I remember back in ancient history when that Pirates of the Caribbean sequel had a budget over $250million and not being able to fathom studios spending that much to make a movie.
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Vivid memory of Terminator 2 $100M in 1991.
Yeah, but you can definitely see where the $200+ million budget went. Davey Jones' CGI looks so impressive even today whereas if you ask me The Flash and Indy 5 look like sub-$200 million projects.
The opening scene of Indiana Jones 5 is just horrid and embarrassing. A deep faked actor playing your leading man fighting on top of a CGI train with CGI nazis with a CGI background.
Are we really above filming a train scene?
Pirates 1 cgi def has some issues, but 2 and 3 look so good with all the on location and well done cgi
There is probably 75% of the Flash budget that was just wasted with the different attempts reshoots and such. What you see on screen probably is a 100M$ film at best
Then how much would it be for Indy half a billion?
Wasn't that film stuck in production hell throughout the pandemic?
I mean the star is 80 years old, you want to be the guy who killed Harrison Ford?
At this point I fully believe that if he died during production Disney would use a CGI homunculus to finish the movie
It was in production hell even before the pandemic too lol
Plus they shutdown due to injuring Ford a few times.
They also shot that one in the UK, so I wouldn't be surprised if Caroline Reid from Forbes strikes again.
Not necessarily. Most of budget can easily go to paying well known actors big pay. Doctor strange has repeat cast who all would demand more because of the first films success. The same can't be said for the flash
They'd all be signed to multi-film contracts ahead of time.
Elizabeth Olsen and Keaton presumably got above quote salaries because they're impossible to work around if they say no.
I imagine Keaton's now scrapped "Batman Begins" role and Olsen's "Wandavison" role were both negotiated at the same time as their contracts for the film in question.
Well, Olsen for example, was still a returning face. Even if she negotiated Wandavision and MoM together, she could still demand quite a chunk of money (especially since those both shot back to back basically, meaning she couldn’t take on any other outside projects)
Sure, but Olsen is the only example of this. Cumberbatch,
Amy AdamsRachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Benedict Wong are presumably all working off of the contracts they signed in 2016 (?).I imagine some/all got pay bumps from the first film but it's limited by negotiations they made before their contracts were signed.
Keep in mind though that Flash was technically in development for 7 years. A movie in the works for that long will absolutely end up with a massive final budget.
On the other hand, development costs are not included in the UK tax credit spending so it wouldn't be included in this number for DS2 either.
Why? I assume most of the costs didn't happen until they actually started filming. The 5 or so years before that probably didn't cost much
Depends on where in development they are.
For example, Blade keeps getting production delayed over and over again. I know some of the crew who have been on payroll for that movie for months, just sitting around waiting for information so they can get to work, but it never fails they’ll get started on something and then it’s delayed again. Only, you still keep those people on payroll, otherwise they move on to other projects.
Also, for things like The Flash, they’re likely bringing in writer after writer to work on the script, each one getting paid for each draft they turn in. That also gets expensive
When movies experience delay after delay like Flash did, you have to keep in mind all the people that have come and gone, such as directors and writers, that had to be paid. Rewrites, firing directors, etc. all costs money.
From the article. Doesn't seem like most of that was going to the actors.
And dial of destiny.
Wonder what the mermaid budget is
400-450M
Don't be ridiculous
Legitimately starting to worry about the future of movies. This is not sustainable.
It is since they are halo products.
The films being profitable doesn't matter to the big media conglomerates they need the films to sell in Disney's case theme park tickets, merchandise and a reason to have Disney+.
Comcast is another great example in the first quarter 2023 NBCUniversal's studio division made just under $3 billion in revenue but $2.35 billion of that was licencing films and shows to others while theatrical itself was only $319 million!
Paramount, Lionsgate and WBD are more at risk but then that's been true for about 7 years at this point.
Except Disney+ hemorrhages money. Feeding films to a place where they will lose more money is not a great strategy.
Disney did ~$83B in revenue and $28B in profits last year. They can eat unit losses if that IP drives revenue elsewhere (merch, parks, Etc.)
I am seeing just $4 billion in net income. on a TTM (trailing 12 months) basis. Down from highs of 13B in 2019.
Revenue is $87B, so Disney have a margin of 4.5%. So I would take stories of how everything makes a ton of money with a grain of salt: the only way for margins to end up as 4.5% when estimates of everything makes a ton of money is for these estimates to be systematically too high.
Didn't they just lay off tons of employees?
You know they only have 10 billion cash on hand and are looking at paying Universal a minimum of 9.7 billion at the end of 2023 for Hulu. They are not too hot, hence the layoffs
But apparently they can't afford 7k+ employees
I heard the Star Wars ”hotel” is shutting down.
Yeah and they took a big fall from where they once were a few years ago. Those profits look decent until you tell stockholders that.
Movies that nobody want to watch do not make money in merchandising and parks though.
Like do you think they'll have lots of merchandising money for Elemental and Indiana Jones 5?
Currently sure but once costs go down and prices rise and it starts making money it's going to be a money printer.
Linear TV is dying and streaming will be made a profitable replacement.
Theatrical has been a terrible standalone business for a long time.
That is not going to change so either streaming takes off or the film/TV show business dies.
This is gambling. Disney+ was already supposed to be more profitable now then it is. The 2020 shift was geared up to be the big switch from theaters and it didn't happen.
Just because Linear TV is falling, doesn't mean there aren't more options that are more affordable.
These numbers from tax filings are not like to like with other numbers you see. If you want to use the 2.5x rule of thumb, you’re best off using the number in the trades, not the number in these filings.
In fairness, in this particular case, the statements straight out say the movie is costing more than budgeted due to COVID.
These last several batches were near the end of the COVID productions that had to start/stop/start again, with some writers delays and production delays for injuries, etc. so their budgets are naturally higher than normal since they needed to shut down and restart production as well as additional precautions added in. Theoretically after this wave should have more reasonable budgets as things went back to normal. Though the writers strike (and possibly the SAG strike) will probably delay a lot of releases again
In the Assembled show for this movie, they mention that they intended to shoot the New York scenes in Cleveland, but couldn't due to travel restrictions, so they built an entire set in the UK at short notice. That, along with moving any specialist staff to do that, would not have been cheap.
Legitimally thinking about the big money laundering schemes the movies get into from some of their funding sources.
It is hard to believe there isn’t high levels of money laundering in Hollywood.
Reddit and it's stupid money laundering conspiracies. Explain to me how you think laundering money works. Edit: Downvote? Here, I'll explain it to you, genius: To launder money you need a business that is artificially successful, not one that is failing. You need to justify sudden profits, not massive expenses. You can't launder money if your books show you LOSING money.
Yeah it is the go to conspiracy of reddit. Similar to whenever someone posted something positive about a marvel or DC movie on IMDB they were accused of "getting paid by the studio" lol.
The accounting they use is fraudulent in some places outside the US but that's about as far as it goes.
No point in explaining to idiots mate
Yeah people also have no idea how laundering money works anyway (you would think they would with series like Ozark or Breaking Bad). Movies budget aren't spent in cash obtained through illegal means.
Studios need to cut back on these damn budgets, it’s really that simple. These actors certainly don’t need 20-30M
Just as a note this budget would be paid for by 14 days of the parks operating profit
Disney is never going to struggle with budgeting because these budgets are chump change to the money the parks make
That hasn’t stopped them from cutting billions in costs over the last few months.
And even if they ‘can’ afford it doesn’t mean they are going to continue if they are losing money.
And they are just doubling down on sequels and remakes that have been rejected more and more lately.
Me, as well. The answer for previous down periods was to give the greenlight to challenging, modestly budgeted work from young directors with films aimed at adults (the 1970's, for example).
The problem is that sort of content is out there, fucking fantastic, and available inexpensively via streaming. Something like "The Godfather" would be a prestige series on Apple TV or whatever.
If action franchises and animated movies (even good ones) can't reliably fill theaters and terrific content is available at home... I genuinely am scared for cinema.
Wait until the real budgets of this summers releases come out in a year or two.
The Flash: 1.5B
I think Indiana Jones is going to come in at a huge number. I imagine politically no one wanted to cancel their prestige pic during covid when jobs were scarce and Ford probably had an exit clause that wasn't worth paying out. Not to mention the egos of the IP's owners and producers refusing to take a hit.
There's going to be a famous business school whitepaper about this movie and the sunk cost fallacy one day.
Yup. Once it becomes more common knowledge about the reshoots that John Williams and Harrison Ford have both confirmed now (much to the anger of people defending KK, Mangold, and Disney, claiming there were no reshoots), its going to be fun to hear what the real numbers actually looked like.
Yep, I don't buy the "no reshoots at the end" thing. Not saying I agree with that DoomCock or 4Chan leaker, because the "plot leak" details they posted turned out wrong too. But I can see Disney having had multiple versions of the ending to try out with audiences. This movie was supposed to come out in 2021, so everyone we see in the movie is actually 2 years younger.
If not, Disney better openly explain why the budget for Indy 5 is almost the same as freaking Endgame!
Aside from whoever those people are, Harrison Ford said they went back to "work on the ending a little bit" and Jon Williams said they had to redo the ending, as well. Now that critics and audiences are seeing it, one of the universal conclusions is that the ending felt "tacked on".
I trust both of them over KK, Mangold, or any other person on the Disney executive payroll. Williams and Ford are rolling in so much money already, and they clearly don't give a shit about politics. Good for both of them.
I don't care what people said. I bet they had multiple versions of endings (the one we have now could be seen as divisive) and shot multiple versions. Harrison even said something was added at the end later in production (I won't spoil but it's the very last scene).
Because other than that, I have no clue why this movie was $320M-$350M and possibly cost more than Endgame. Absolutely ridiculous. There's de-aging costs, but Captain Marvel and other movies had similar amounts. The Irishman had way more.
1 morbillion dollars
That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people on this sub. The Flash’s cost was definitely well over $300M, possibly approaching $400M
Given that the trades were talking about the small chance WB killed the film entirely in early 2022, that just doesn't make conceptual sense.
WB put a lot of support behind The Flash but by Fall 2022, Hamada's "sprint to Crisis on Infinite Earths" plan was dead and Miller was getting pretty toxic so The Flash wasn't a core tentpole of the DC Franchise's future.
Flash didn't have notable COVID shutdowns and, based on audience reactions, it clearly skimped on post-production VFX work/chose a cheaper stylized visual approach in many places. I just doubt it's one of the most expensive films of all time.
There’s just no evidence for it though. This case with DS2 is the exception, usually the budget that is initially reported during release are all the public knows about.
The Flash’s money doesn’t even show onscreen and all they reshot after principal was the ending. ViewerAnon has been the only person to ever quote even approaching 300M.
What the fuck are with these budgets, man? They're crapping out multiple $200 million+ projects (before marketing) like it's going out of style, and their movies are having issues making money. All the puff pieces, all the articles attacking fans of the movies, all of that cannot excuse away the fact that they're doing a piss poor job at marketing the movies and the product that ends up on the screen feels like the studio can't read the fucking room.
The worst part is that the budgets aren’t even showing onscreen. Someone could’ve told me DS2 was made for 100-125M and I would believe them
COVID delays and safety requirements stacked up, so all of the stuff coming out now had their regular budgets, but then added in the delays and costs with re-ramping up production again after delays were done (with additional safety). So right now everything has a ton of money invested, hence why we're getting seemingly blockbuster type film after blockbuster type film this summer. Every studio had massive delays in production + VFX, but now everything is ready and they're trying to get their backlog out.
These studios need to hire a thrifty financial officer and just say no to all the director's budget requests. Make them think outside the box and get more creative with the solutions.
It's like in Star Trek where the bottle episodes sometimes end up being my favorite episodes of the season. They needed to come up with creative solutions to the budget constraints.
It's generally not the directors ballooning the budgets. It's the studio coming in with all sorts of demands and changes.
Makes sense considering the amount of delays in production and constant rewrites.
However, that may be the gross budget before accounting for tax credits.
Two paragraphs from the article give the nitty gritty details:
This is the net spending listed on UK tax credit forms (so after 50M in tax rebates).
If you read the article, you’d know that number is accounting for the credits received
These out of control budgets will be the film industry's undoing.
tl;dr Forbes, and others has been diving into UK tax credit documentation to find out what Disney listed the production budget as to UK government (so these numbers are going to be systematically higher than trade numbers which are generically rounded down by a decent percentage).
"Disney reveals" because Disney confirmed this was their filing.
I think u/itsallgoodman6 was trying to post this 2 days ago.
so not going to include any/most backend payments to talent which can inflate costs.
This is a good find, but it’s incomplete. VFX is usually farmed out to other countries and gets separate tax rebates there.
Costs on this movie were ridiculous because it had a last minute 6 week reshoot and new VFX for those scenes.
!!
Yeah, I'm starting to retroactively realize the "don't worry about reshoots" downplaying doesn't really make a lot of conceptual sense here. Did we ever learn what was changed?
I vaguely recall Sam Raimi talking about the opening scene on the press tour. But 6 weeks is enough to practically shoot a whole movie.
Illuminati members were constantly being swapped out. The film was meant to have Balder the Brave and Janet van Dyne's Wasp at one point. I'm pretty sure Mr. Fantastic and Black Bolt were last minute additions.
The only removed illuminati member was Baldur the brave, wasp was just a concept and was never actually filmed
Wouldn't shock me if Spider-Man: No Way Home got an article like this one. The productions on both of them were the same. (During the ye olden days of Covid, with delays, reshoots and VFX crunching up until the last minute.) Although that one was in Atlanta, Georgia, where 20% of costs are state covered, as that's how the U.S tax incentive system works. (I think.)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, however, was shot in the UK, so...
So does this mean Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3’s reported budget of $250M is actually gonna end up being like $300M or even higher ?
Even without this specific number existing you'd be pretty reasonable to estimate a 250M budgeted film "really" had a budget of 285/290M. That's just a normal sort of discrepancy. No idea how it applies to this specific situation though.
So do we just have to not believe movie budgets from now on?
You can believe the reported budgets are estimates, as that's all they usually are.
Maybe, although I’m pretty sure James Gunn is one of the directors that never goes over his budgets. He’s also the sole writer/director which probably streamlines/makes the whole production more cost efficient compared to DS2 which changed different creatives multiple times.
Depends on who’s asking. Tax man? 400 million. Investors? A lean 150 million.
I always assume this with blockbusters tbh.
I’m sure it’s not for all for this one reason and that the others aren’t super great, but don’t forget how COVID ballooned budgets. Pretty sure this was one of many affected
I believe Variety had an article that estimated COVID protocols added at least 5% to film and television costs. That's not counting delays and shut downs.
I'm guessing inflation was a pretty big factor too. $100 in 2018 was worth $116 in 2022. Not to mention the cost of certain things went up way more. Like how fuel prices were up huge in 2021 and 2022.
I cannot emphasize enough: The budgets traditionally reported in/to the trades are not the same as the budgets reported for tax rebates.
This is why every single list of Most Expensive Movies Ever has a bunch of tax rebate-reported budgets at the top of the list.
Yeah. Sure. This is also why lawyers find it impossible to bill hours to their clients.
Really makes me wonder how bad Batgirl was
Misread this as Strange World and thought “Jesus Christ…”
Notice how they been pushing out dozens of $200M+ movies and we just had a recession not even 2 years ago🙃 where was this money during Covid?
We're in the middle of a recession so budgets keeping going up.
Recession = negative GDP growth. Since GDP growth values aren’t updated constantly, you can’t know for sure if you’re in the middle of one. Especially since many definitions require multiple subsequent quarters of the negative growth.
The US wasn’t in one the last time GDP values were published (Q1), so that would imply that officially, the earliest a recession could be identified is when Q3 values get published.
This was filmed during peak COVID so i’m not surprised
Also am betting No Way Home cost more than 200M
290 x 2.5 = 725
It made profit, but Disney was obviously expecting over a billion with this kind of spend to make the time and resources worth it
it had insane opening.
400m+ Billion would be gurantee.
I suspect L and T barely broke even if they're revising budgets upwards.
Theatrically it didn't, disney+ paid 160M for it lol
Makes sense as the movie had to be filmed twice basically
Hmm can you tell me more?
test screenings werent good so they reshoot it
They were doing reshoots up to February/March i think
this telling me that you need to add $50M on top of anything Disney made for cost.
I can see the flash costing 400M over the 10 year development time.
Why would it cost 400M when they only had writers hired and none of them were expensive writers
Why the fuck would it be that high? They weren't doing anything besides writing.
the movie actually never had any proper director until muschetti
HOW???
Disney is insane atm
sending rockets to mars actually costs lower. what the fck are they doing with all that money ? and the worse part is they are not even innovating any new tech with all that money. back in the day lord of the rings made a software for that war scenes or avatar had crazy realistic cgi for imax etc. what the actual fck.
Well fuck. Maybe this sub is right to think "either a movie makes a billion or it's a flop".
Reading this, there's no fucking way Flash costed $220 million. This has got to stop!
Now it is even clearer why WBD was desesperate to make the most money out it even, with any strategy.
Seems they're all fudging the numbers a bit (all the major studios). Ain't no way Barbie only costs a slim $100M, especially with so many stars. I'm waiting for the later article with the updated figure with something more believable.
The fact that this movie and Eternals (which wrapped filming February 2020) cost the same amount kind of hurts the “it was COVID measure costs” excuse.
I mean eternals was 236m after tax credit, vs 290m from Doctor Strange
Per Forbes it was 273 million:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2023/02/13/eternals-was-over-budget-says-marvel/?sh=c12ff3836853
They have to be lying about other budgets as well.
Or getting money from sources that launder it, who knows.
Didn’t really show honestly, the movie wasn’t that great visually and most of the magic used was pretty underwhelming. Gotg 3’s budget was 40m less yet visually that movie looked way better Imo
They built lots of sets including a recreation of a NYC street in the UK.
Wouldn't be surprised if all their movies are 100mil more
And they spent it on what?!?!
On the multiple elaborate sets and ridiculous amount of digital effect shots?
On tomato cans ?
Jesus Christ
It’s great they are finally including the coke budget in the total.
What?!
So then how much less does this make the film’s profit?
Still profitable, but far less. These 2020–2023 budgets are just fucking crazy
This is just not sustainable. With the possibility of an actors strike it’s never been more important to get used to watching foreign films and shows. These studios are going to collapse.
Disney’s loss carryforward is gonna be larger than our GDP.
Not too surprised about this, it LOOKS like the most expensive Marvel movie in a long time and I say that in a good way, most of their movies since and including Endgame look cheap and rushed.
To many people are now assuming that every Disney is budget is underreported. While that may be the case for some select few films DS2 had extradionaru circumstances working against it. It was filmed at the height of the Covid pandemic, production was shutdown halfway through, and then the film allegedly needed massive reshoots. All of that adds to the budget.
What the fuck Disney quit spending so much
The budgets are always much higher than what is officially reported / estimated. ALWAYS.
Remember that with The Flash, which was reported most recently to have had a $220M budget. I think if we add about $150M to that number we’ll have the true Flash budget, pre-marketing.
Also, this title is misleading. If you read the link, Disney spent $349M on the production of MoM. They then got $54M in tax credits. So the budget was $349M and the net cost was $296M. But they spent $349M to make this movie, pre-tax credits and pre-marketing costs. If you then count the marketing costs, which are typically around $100M, the net cost ballon’s back up to around $400M.
Either way, it still earned a profit.
It did, but less than we thought it did. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but it’s probably around $100M-$150M in profit, when we thought it might’ve been a lot more.
The Numbers thinks Dr Strange 2 made around $950m, so 2.5x would be around $740m
https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Doctor-Strange-in-the-Multiverse-of-Madness-(2022)#tab=summary
Okay so that’s still around $200M then if those numbers are accurate.
Still a great performance but this is just another example of how we need to be careful when it comes to budget reporting, especially for movies filmed during pandemic times.
Doesn’t include the marketing costs. So the final profit is lower
Jesus
Looks like they might be overstating it to get a bigger tax break?
Also this was heavily affected by COVID and production shut down multiple times including reshoots.
At this point I'm gonna go get my tinfoil hat and assume Disney et al are doing some (new?) form of Hollywood accounting.
Over-reporting the amount the production spent in the UK would inflate the tax rebate Disney receive from HMRC
I have no idea whether Disney can charge US expenses to the UK arm of the production, to artificially inflate the UK-spend
But if there's a way to do that, I'm absolutely certain Disney's armies of lawyers and accountants have discovered it
i wonder what other budgets they lied about
Most budgets are off by a decent amount (but not all). This is constantly attested to in interviews, statements by third party analysts, and supported by leaked internal data about film budgets.
Forbes revealed a few months back that Eternals was actually $236M, never got posted in this sub but it makes its performance a lot more bleak in hindsight.
Definitely due to COVID. This wouldn't cost over $200 million in pre-pandemic times.
That’s not true at all. When Disney had to do some filing years after the release, it turned out The Force Awakens cost them something like $450M to make.
Did it?
Deadline's TFA estimate
IF WE PRETEND all costs were in the UK
259M budget
100M Participations
43M residuals
= 402M "Deadline's estimate of what UK tax documents should say was the film's final production budget.
so the gap is ~50M not 200M. However, that assumption is obviously wrong (e.g. Jakku was filmed in Abu Dhabi ). I have no idea what TFA's true budget was but conceptually, I don't think we can treat that budget as the true production budget.
It's the same problem with PotC4.
Actually, I was mistaken. The Force Awakens cost even more - $533.2M budget with a net cost of $446.2M, pre-marketing.
And way back when it was released, the trades reported it’s budget as $245M.
Are these films money laundering schemes?!