Originally published March 5, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
Neil Calloway thinks the supersized budget for Avengers: Infinity War makes sense…
With news this week that seems like confirmation that the nest two Avengers films, Infinity War and the so far unimaginatively titled Avengers 4 will have a budget of $1 billion, my first reaction was “I bet it doesn’t; it’s all part of the marketing campaign.” By the time Infinity War comes out in 2018, we’ll be ten years, nineteen films and nine TV shows into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even the biggest Avengers fan has to be slightly flagging by this point. But I’d bet that you’re more intrigued to see what $1 billion looks like on screen than you are $999,999,999.
My second thought was, that if it’s true, it’s probably good value. This is the week that Snapchat, a company that makes nothing and has never turned a profit, made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange and was valued at $28 billion. Given that Marvel are a huge company with comics, films, TV shows, merchandise and more, putting $1 billion down for a couple of movies doesn’t seem that much when you realise how much profit they’ll will make; they’ll be getting residuals for decades to come.
Another explanation for the huge budget also lies in the fact that we’re a decade in to the franchise; by now every actor has to have their own little moment in each film, and they cost money. A clue to the huge budget comes from the title; Infinity War, it’s going to be big, and needs to be bigger than previous instalments or people will just go off and watch Jurassic World 2 or the Han Solo movie. Each movie in a franchise needs to be bigger, better, louder than the last one, and the budget balloons under the weight of getting the script right, paying the cast and all their assorted hangers on (you think Robert Downey Jr turns up on a film set without a small army of assistants?), and the budget for effects – both practical and CGI. $1 billion is beginning to sound like a steal.
The budget is probably lower than it could have been; by shooting the films back to back they’re saving money that would have gone on shooting two separate movies a year apart; they’ll get away with paying people slightly less, the sets won’t have to be put in storage and rebuilt.
It’s worth remembering that the current holder of the biggest budget for a film is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which apparently cost $378.5 million, with $55 million of that going to Johnny Depp (one imagines that most of that has since gone on fees for divorce lawyers), and it’s fairly obvious that the MCU is a bigger prospect than Pirates of the Caribbean.
Rather than being ridiculous, $1 billion is a sound investment.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
