On Captain Marvel 2's Budget

Another day, another revelation that makes Disney's finances look even worse than before--with, once again, Disney-Marvel's milking of the British government's system for subsidizing movies leading to the public disclosure at the root of it.

The latest has to do with the outlay for Captain Marvel 2, with some fuss now being made over Forbes' reporting the budget as $275 million, a number touted as twice what had previously been announced--the $130 million figure we heard back in April.

However, as anyone who actually read the reports back in the spring should have registered, the claim was not that the whole project cost $130 million, but that (as the title of Forbes' own April piece put it!) the production company had spent "$130 Million Two Months into Filming." The result was that, especially as $130 million seemed paltry for a Marvel movie--especially a follow-up to the big-budgeted and high-grossing Captain Marvel, especially in this age of inflation, interest rate hike- and pandemic disruption-related production budget--and so I never took it for more than part of the total sum, to be revealed later.*

Accordingly the $275 million figure we are now hearing strikes me not as some scandal, but as completely unsurprising. (In fact it seems less surprising after those other revelations we heard about what Marvel's most recent movies cost, like the far-greater sum--$1.2 billion!--spent on Avengers 3 and 4.)

And of course, the $275 million figure fails to take into account the $55 million subsidy that is, after all, how we got to hear about all this, lowering the net production cost to the vicinity of $220 million.

The fuss thus seems to me a testament to the lack of basic reading skills among those who pass for journalists in this day and age--and, in fairness, also to the way many seem to be reveling in the way that Disney has gone from being Hollywood's champion in the '10s to looking like it is in dire straits.

* The production of the first Captain Marvel cost Disney $175 million net according to Deadline. Perhaps an underestimate (given how Deadline's figures have been consistently low next to the figures we now hear about) it is equal to around $210 million today--way more than that $130 million we heard about, even before inflation, but not much less than the $220 million net production cost of the new movie.