James Gunn is yet again denying that “Superman” had a budget of $363M. If you remember, earlier in the year, an article in the Columbus Business Journal, citing the government website Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit, revealed the $363M figure.
Here’s Gunn today, via Threads, tackling the report:
I don’t know if it’s faked or if it’s just some weird form an assistant in the Cleveland office filled out putting random stuff in the blanks. I sent it to our accountants and financial producers when it first came out a year ago and no one knew what it was. I can just tell you it wasn’t anyone on our team!
I mean .. should we believe a document that got filed with the government (most likely under penalty of perjury), or Gunn? I doubt Warner Bros lied in their tax claim. Here’s what the official filing says:
‘Superman Legacy’ filed a tax credit application for $36,972,289 and the full production budget is 363,845,386.00. They have to provide all of this information due to Section 122.85 of the Ohio Code.
Gunn would technically be correct that the $363M figure wouldn’t the final net budget, but it would, per law, have to be awfully close to that amount.
Generally, the budget for massive superhero movies like “Superman” can be anywhere between $200M-$300M, and some, like the ‘Avengers’ movies, have gone even higher than that. So, this isn’t a total shock to hear. Earlier in the year, a source had told me that the budget was definitely near the $300M.
The last two ‘Superman’ movies, 2006’s “Superman Returns” and 2013’s “Man of Steel,” had production budgets in the $200M range. More recently, “Justice League” was made for $300M. So, it’s not too crazy to believe that Gunn’s take on the character will be higher than those movies.
Regardless, the “Superman” trailer seems to be a hit — it garnered 119M views in its first 24 hours across all social media. It’s also just surpassed the 1M likes on YouTube, with only 64k dislikes.