The production budget of 2023’s Deadpool & Wolverine crossed $500m, according to a new filing from Disney – although it did get a rebate…
Wherever you stand on 2023’s billion-dollar grossing Deadpool & Wolverine, few would look at it and peg it as one of the most expensive movies ever made. And yet a new earnings report has detailed how that’s exactly what it became.
The actual total cost of the film, as per a new earnings report issued by Disney, topped $550m. To put that in some degree of context, that’d fund the negatives of the last three Christopher Nolan films, or pretty much the entire directorial output of someone like George Miller. Heck, it’d buy you a trio of Waterworlds, and just imagine that.
Disney, though, didn’t end up spending $550m itself, as the film qualified for tax breaks and reimbursements in the UK, which reduced the bill by some $110m. As part of qualifying for that, a full earnings report eventually has to be published, and that’s why details of Deadpool & Wolverine are only now coming to light.
The film was made under a specially set up production company called Richmond Street Productions Ltd, and you can find its UK Companies House record here. As per any UK company, accounts are available to download too.
Specific to the movie itself, the filings of Richmond Street Productions Ltd confirm that Deadpool & Wolverine went over budget. Aside from the A-list talent (Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman alone don’t come cheap, and that’s before the cameos) and back end deals involved, one factor that impacted the movie’s production was a pair of strikes in 2023. Both actors and screenwriters downed tools, and that meant that production on Deadpool & Wolverine had to be suspended once filming had begun.
During that time, further material was apparently developed, that in turn incurred physical costs when it was decided to include, spoiler light, different flavours of Wolverine in the movie. That, and Disney had to keep funding the assorted production facilities even when filming was suspended.
The movie has, in box office terms, become the most success for Marvel directly since Avengers: Endgame grossing in the end over $1.3bn (the Spider-Man movies have grossed more, but they’re Sony productions in conjunction with Marvel.) It’s not as if Disney won’t have banked some profit from the film, not least when all the assorted merchandise and home formats are taken into consideration.
Still, I watched Deadpool & Wolverine on a very big screen, and if you’d have asked me to guess its production budget based, I wouldn’t have come up with a number that was half as much as was spent making the movie. That’s why I sit here and write about films I guess, and other more talented people get to make them!
More at Forbes, here.