Is Hollywood Becoming More Careful With its Movie Budgets?

Last year, considering the ways in which The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 in particular flopped I predicted massive losses for each--rather more massive than those films actually suffered according to Deadline, which reported losses of around $150 million for each of those films.

There seems ample reason to be surprised by this, starting with the budgets on which Deadline bases the calculation. In spite of a more than 20 percent jump in prices according to the Consumer Price Index since 2018-2019, and the spiking of interest rates raising the cost of borrowing, the reported production costs do not seem much higher than before, big superhero films, for example, still commonly reported as $200 million productions. The constancy of the budgets is the more surprising given how what we were given in 2023 at least appeared to be gross, not net, figures; and how many major releases of 2023 suffered from cost-raising pandemic-related disruptions.

I am even more struck by the expenditures on prints and ads, which for the films identified as the biggest failures were low relative even to their reported budgets and to what was spent on other comparable productions--$110 million for Captain Marvel 2, $120 million for the Flash and Indiana, whereas the expenditure was $160 million for Disney's Guardians of the Galaxy 3, the $150 million and $175 million for the much cheaper Super Mario Bros. and Barbie. (The figure for The Flash is actually lower than the $150 million we were told was budgeted for the marketing campaign last June--while if the figure for Captain Marvel 2 is correct Disney-Marvel spent a third less, adjusted for inflation, to promote Captain Marvel 2 than it did to promote the original Captain Marvel back in 2019.*)

One might conclude from the lower-than-expected numbers that Hollywood has become more astute financially, with the low figures for prints and ads perhaps indicating that studio heads who knew they had losers on their hands cut their losses. (Indeed, there was speculation about this in the case of the surprisingly low profile Aquaman 2.) Yet, even if we take the numbers presented as absolutely reliable (and one cannot know that), a handful of films made in these chaotic times tell us only so much, and may be slight grounds for claiming any great shift in the way Hollywood funds filmmaking.

* The figures are $110 million for Captain Marvel 2, and $140 million for the first film (which is more like $170 million when early 2019 prices are adjusted for late 2023 prices).