Yes.
You read the headline correctly. Avengers: Infinity War and the last Avengers film could cost upwards of one billion dollars for Marvel.
That’s the big question right now among a lot of people in the industry. It’s all based on a quote from Pinewood Studios President and CEO, Dan Cathy, who spoke at the African American Film Critics Association saying, “We now have on the lot down there now the largest film production ever with a $1 billion budget.” We pulled this from Bizjournals.com. Obviously, he’s under contract to not say who that is, but we can take a pretty wild guess.
The list of films in production at Pinewood is not public, so it’s entirely possible there is a production there none of us are aware of. However, we do know that Marvel shoots a lot of their films out of there. Captain America: Civil War shot there, Spider-Man: Homecoming shot there, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Thor: Ragnarok — all had pieces that were filmed on the backlots there. Currently under production from Marvel is Black Panther and the next two Avengers films, Infinity War and the fourth, untitled one.
We’ve heard rumors in the past about Avengers: Infinity War, parts I and II, costing a billion dollars. Notably, Bleeding Cool reported this back in October with the claim that they had heard more than a few people talking about this at bars surrounding New York Comic Con, but since no sources could be named other than “In huddled conversation with very well sourced comic book film insiders in New York bars.”
Then, in January of this year, a report from Scottish paper, The Telegraph, made the claim that the first film would cost 400 million pounds and there were expecting that to bring upwards of 10 million pounds injected into their economy from the production.
Taking all of this into consideration, either Cathy is quoting all these other sources, which would imply he doesn’t know the budgets of the films shooting in his studio, or he’s telling the truth as he knows it. And again, we are assuming that this quote of his pertains to Avengers: Infinity War, but it’s the only film there that makes sense, especially when you consider that this is applicable to two films shooting simultaneously and that they are what they are — the last two films of an epic ten year cinematic journey.
That is: these numbers make sense for these two films.
If this is true, that will make Avengers: Infinity War and it’s follow up film the most expensive films ever made. If we take into account Prints and Advertising, which is an additional 50% added to the budget, the next two Avengers films will cost $1.5 Billion and that all has to be recouped by all the investors to justify the costs.
The last two Avengers films cost around $225 Million for the first one and Age of Ultron came in closer to $300 Million. With P&A (prints and advertising), total negative costs, before any state rebates, would be around $337.5 Million for the first Avengers film and Age of Ultron would be around $450 Million.
However, their worldwide grosses are estimated at about $1.5 Billion for Avengers and $1.4 Billion for Age of Ultron.
So let’s do some quick math on these next two films. If Marvel spends $1Billion between the two films, their total negative cost is upwards of $1.5Billion, pre-rebates, which means that each film would need to make at least $775 million. If the past has shown us anything, those films are guaranteed to make at least $1.4 Billion. However, given the gigantic event that these films will be, it’s safe to assume that they’ll each do better than that. If each one grosses $1.4 Billion, that’s a total of $2.8 Billion for both, which is almost double their negative costs.
This is simply for theatrical release as well and says nothing of the merchandising, licensing or ancillary rights or the home video releases. With every character ever in this movie, they’ll make a few billion just from that.
So, yeah, we’d say it’s worth it.
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