‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ Just Dethroned ‘Star Wars’ as the Most Expensive Movie Ever Made
For decades, the question of which Hollywood film carries the biggest price tag has been surprisingly difficult to answer. Studios guard their financial data carefully, budgets get obscured by accounting tricks, and the publicly cited figures rarely tell the full story. But a rare window into the real numbers has just opened up, and the result is a record-breaking revelation that nobody in the industry saw coming quite so dramatically.
The key lies in the United Kingdom’s film financing system. Studios filming in the UK benefit from the government’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit, which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of their spending as an incentive for foreign studios to use British talent and locations. To qualify, productions must set up separate Film Production Companies in the UK and file detailed financial statements, which effectively forces a level of cost transparency that American studios never face at home.
Those filings are what brought the bombshell to light. According to analysis of recently filed financial statements, Universal Pictures spent $658.8 million making ‘Jurassic World: Dominion,’ surpassing the previous record-holder, Disney’s ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens,’ which cost $638.9 million. The story was first reported exclusively by Fortune, and it immediately rewrote the blockbuster history books.
‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ was the final film of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s ‘Jurassic World’ trilogy, and it brought in original franchise stars Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. The sheer scale of the production, spanning multiple countries, extensive creature effects, and a cast of that magnitude, was always going to be expensive. But the pandemic turned expensive into historic. Filmed at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, Universal had to adopt costly safety protocols during production and faced months of delays that pushed the premiere back by a year to June 2022. Cast and crew had to quarantine for months at a time, holed up in the opulent Langley Hotel near Pinewood Studios, where rooms cost more than $600 a night.
Universal’s filings show that ‘Dominion’ was the most expensive of the three latest ‘Jurassic World’ films, followed by ‘Fallen Kingdom’ at $606.3 million, with the combined UK reimbursement of $262.1 million bringing Universal’s net outlay on the trilogy down to $1.3 billion. The UK tax credit did soften the blow somewhat. The reimbursement helped reduce Universal’s final cost, with the company receiving around $127.8 million back and bringing its net spending down to approximately $531 million.
As for returns, ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ grossed $376.9 million in the United States and Canada and $626.8 million internationally, for a worldwide total of just over $1 billion, making it the third-highest-grossing film of 2022. That is a genuine commercial achievement, but it sits well below what the franchise managed before pandemic costs inflated the bill. ‘Jurassic World,’ which rebooted the series in 2015, ended its theatrical run with $1.6 billion globally, while 2018’s ‘Fallen Kingdom’ grossed $1.3 billion globally.
For ‘Star Wars’ loyalists, the dethroning of ‘The Force Awakens,’ which had held the official record with a net budget of $536 million, will sting in a particular way, given how much cultural weight that film carried when it roared back into theaters. The crown now belongs to dinosaurs, and the full story of how a pandemic-era blockbuster quietly became the most expensive film ever made is one Hollywood will be debating for years. Do you think a film should ever cost this much to make, and does ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ justify its staggering price tag in your mind?
