Jurassic World: Dominion Is the Most Expensive Movie of All Time! Why?
We’ve got some interesting news about the Jurassic Park/World franchise, specifically Jurassic World: Dominion which was recently named the most expensive movie of all time. Which is very weird and strange when you factor in how much money the movie made. Here we go!
The News/My Thoughts
Film budgets have been an interesting discussion over the last several years as so many big tentpole blockbusters are having these budgets that are so much higher than they should be. Disney is a big victim of this where so many of their blockbusters are having $250 million+ budgets when it doesn’t make any sense. For example, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has a $290 million budget, when having a $300 million Indiana Jones movie makes absolutely zero sense.
And, along those same lines, when a movie is shot in the UK it’s a law out there that the tax forms for movies must be revealed. Because of COVID and what not, the original budget for this movie was $531 million. But due to the tax laws, it received a $127 million rebate from the UK government. Which means the budget for the film is $658 million, and it surpassed Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens as the most expensive movie of all time. It's crazy that the sixth movie in a franchise that didn’t even get great or even good reviews is the most expensive movie of all time. Where did that $658 million go to produce the film? If people want to say, “well the returning cast member probably got big pay checks.” Sure, but that still doesn’t explain the $658 million budget. The CGI heavy sequences or the globe trotting adventure still doesn’t explain the $658 million budget. As a point of reference, Jurassic World: Rebirth’s budget from last year is $265 million, a third of what Dominion cost. Once again, what happened with the production of Jurassic World: Dominion, that caused the film’s budget to spike to insane numbers.
What’s crazier about this, is the Jurassic franchise is famous for making a lot of money despite their being dwelling returns to the franchise and poor reviews. Because Jurassic Park/World is the ultimate dinosaur franchise and the only dinosaur franchise, they consistently print money and make $1 billion. Jurassic World: Rebirth didn’t make $1 billion, but it still made $875 million and that’s the franchise on its traumatic day. Because people love dinosaurs and you had Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum return it made over $1 billion. But if you go the movie profitability scale, for a film to be profitable it needs to make 2.5 to 3 times its budget to be profitable. If the budget for Dominion was $658 million, that means the movie needed to make $1.645-$1.974 billion to be profitable. It needed to surpass the original 2015, Jurassic World to be the highest grossing film of the franchise. This movie only made $1,001,978,080, it inched past $1 billion. Which means that despite the film making $1 billion, the film lost money and may not have been profitable. It’s crazy that a film that made $1 billion and is the 61st highest grossing movie of all time lost money. $1 billion is normally this incredible milestone for a movie because there’s only 61 movies in history that make a $1 billion. Jurassic World: Dominion was one of them and lost money.
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