‘The Marvels' Actual Budget Leaks ($378M) —Nearly $300M in Losses

“The Marvels” was the MCU’s lowest point. There’s no doubt about it. It will take quite some time for a bigger box office bomb to arrive. The entire movie was a catastrophic failure. Original figures had the film losing over $237M, but that number has just drastically increased.

Disney's fiscal year ends at the end of September so we're getting a rush of film tax credit information filings. One of those filings has leaked, and it shows that Disney/Marvel lost a lot more money that was first hinted at by the trades. The figure is now at around $295M-$300M.

According to the filing, “The Marvels” cost $378M to produce, easily making it one of the most expensive movies ever made. The reported final budget in the trades was $270M, this means they were off by a whopping $100M.

Digging into the details of this filing and you learn that Disney/Marvel spent over $100M on the final year of production — which was after the first round of reshoots occurred — seemingly confirming that a second round of reshoots definitely happened.

“The Marvels” was the first ever MCU movie not to cross the $100 million mark domestically, and it didn’t come remotely close to attaining that figure, finishing its run with a paltry $83 million. It might be the biggest disaster Disney has ever produced.

As part of his damage control campaign, Disney CEO Bob Iger indirectly blamed the pandemic and ‘Marvels’ director Nia DaCosta, the first black female director to ever helm an MCU movie. When interviewed during the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Iger claimed that DaCosta needed extra help to make her movie better, but it never could arrive due to COVID.

Suffice to say, Disney needed a scapegoat for the massive failure and they decided that it was going to be DaCosta. We should also note that DaCosta admitted having had zero creative control on the movie, bluntly stating that “The Marvels” was very much “a Kevin Feige production” and that it was “his movie.”