Two different reports have surfaced that estimate the budget of The Marvels… and there’s quite the discrepancy.
Welcome to Numberwang: The Marvels Edition. It’s not always clear whether chatter about a film’s production budget serves much use, not ahead of its release anyway. Afterwards of course, it’s a metric that can be used to define commercial success, but leading up to a film’s release? It can sometimes just cloud the conversation. However, the buzz surrounding the budget of the The Marvels just took a noteworthy turn, simply because two wildly different estimates have arrived at precisely the same time.
Director, Nia DaCosta recently did a profile with Vanity Fair in which she revealed lots of interesting things. A number of outlets have focused on one particular detail, however – that being a statement that the film’s budget was $130m. That would make it the cheapest Marvel film in a long, long time, by the way.
Conflicting reports have also appeared at the same time, suggesting that the film’s actual budget is closer to double that, peaking at somewhere around the $275m mark, which would make it the most expensive Marvel Studios movie since Avengers: Endgame. That said, around $55m of that is said to be covered by the UK’s subsidy scheme, so a final total of $220m would be more accurate.
Indeed, Forbes reported that the production had spent $130m in the first two months of production alone, whereas the conflicting reports maintain that figure is the film’s final production budget. After a repeat look, we can’t see the original claim in the Vanity Fair piece, but that $130m is being widely reported nonetheless.
As we build up to the release of a film which is sure to generate lots of, ahem, ‘healthy discourse’, it’s a timely reminder that you can’t believe everything you read. One of these estimates (perhaps even both of them) lacks accuracy. Nevertheless, numbers will still be one of the primary factors used to determine The Marvels’ success, whether they’re accurate or not.
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