‘The Fantastic Four’ On Track To Be One Of Disney’s Cheapest Marvel Movies

The Fantastic Four: First Steps cost less to film than any of the other Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero movies Disney has made in the United Kingdom over the past decade according to analysis of recently-filed documents.

Often known as Marvel’s first family, as they were created in 1961 when the comic book company was in its infancy, the Fantastic Four are a group of astronauts who gain super powers on a trip to space. The new movie is the fifth film about the team but the first which is a part of the inter-connected MCU.

It was released in July this year and stars The Mandalorian’s Pedro Pascal as the team’s leader Reed Richards who can stretch his body like elastic. His wife Sue is nicknamed the Invisible Woman after her ability to make herself disappear. She is played by Mission: Impossible’s Vanessa Kirby whilst Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things stars as her on-screen brother. He can cover himself in flames earning him the name of the Human Torch while the rock-like Thing rounds out the team.

Suitably styled like a sixties drama, the film is set in a futuristic version of the era from a parallel universe. Classic cars soar through the sky and New York City is filled with mid-century modern structures which look like the TWA Flight Center at JFK and LAX’s alien-like Theme Building. Despite its quintessentially American appearance, the movie was actually made at the historic Pinewood Studios in the U.K. which lifts the curtain on its costs.

The cost of movies made in the United States is usually a closely-guarded secret as studios combine their spending on all of them in their overall expenses and don’t break out each one individually. It’s a different story in the U.K. Studios filming there benefit from the government’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the U.K. It comes with a catch.

To qualify for the reimbursement, at least 10% of the core costs of the production need to relate to activities in the U.K. and in order to demonstrate this to the government, studios set up a separate Film Production Company (FPC) there for each picture they make in the country. Each FPC has to file annual financial statements and they reveal everything from the headcount and social security payments of the staff to the amount of reimbursement banked by the studio and the total cost of the production. It takes a bit of detective work to get to the bottom of it.

The FPCs usually have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing permits to film on location. Tallying the code names with the productions they are responsible for requires deep industry knowledge which my colleague and I have built up over nearly 15 years of reporting. We are the only journalists worldwide who specialize in covering the financial statements of U.K. film production companies for national media and we have reported on them for more than 10 leading titles including The Times of London, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the London Evening Standard.

Once the code name has been correctly tallied with the film, the financial statements of the relevant FPC can be consulted to reveal how much the movie cost to make. That’s because the terms of the reimbursement state that each FPC must be “responsible for pre-production, principal photography/shooting and post-production of the film; and for delivery of the completed film.” In summary, the FPC’s financial statements have to show the production’s entire costs, not just those incurred in the U.K. Studios aren’t allowed to hide costs in other companies as the terms also state “there can only be one FPC in relation to a film.”

The Disney subsidiary behind The Fantastic Four is called Solve Everything Productions UK in a nod to the team’s plan to stop the towering antagonist Galactus from devouring the earth. As with all U.K. companies, its financial statements are released in stages long after the period they relate to. This starts during pre-production and continues long after the premiere to give the production team time to ensure that all the bills are paid.

It explains why the latest filings for Solve Everything Productions cover the 13 months to November 30, 2024, which coincided with the end of filming. They reveal that by then $229.6 million (£180.9 million) had been spent on the movie with one of the biggest single costs believed to be the wages of the staff who peaked at a monthly average of 265 people. That doesn’t even include freelancers, contractors and temporary workers as they aren’t listed as employees on the books of U.K. companies even though they often represent the majority of the crew on a film shoot.

Disney was reimbursed $48.6 million (£38.3 million) for the movie bringing its net spending down to just $181 million which was a dream ticket for the studio.

Even though the financial statements offer detailed disclosure it can still be tough to draw like-for-like comparisons from them as different movies produce the filings at different stages of the development process. For example, while the financial statements for The Fantastic Four coincided with the end of principal photography, the production company behind Marvel’s 2024 hit Deadpool & Wolverine produced its filings nine months after filming finished. However, just because a precise comparison isn’t always possible that doesn’t mean a comparison isn’t possible at all.

The Fantastic Four’s financial statements were produced eight months before it premiered so the costs shown in them can be compared with the costs in the filings for other production companies covering that same point in the process. This comparison reveals that the six other MCU movies made in the U.K. since the start of the pandemic all had higher costs than The Fantastic Four by the time that filming had finished. They include The Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Its prequel, 2016’s Doctor Strange, is the previous MCU movie which spent less on filming than The Fantastic Four as its entire costs came to around the same sum that movie spent on pre-production and principal photography.

The closest comparison to The Fantastic Four is Marvel’s super hero spy movie Black Widow which premiered on June 29, 2021. Like The Fantastic Four, it also produced financial statements almost precisely eight months before it debuted. They showed that by then $255.6 million had been spent on the movie compared to $229.6 million on The Fantastic Four at precisely the same point before release.

Black Widow’s costs subsequently increased to a total of $296.7 million (£232.3 million) and The Fantastic Four’s spending is likely to rise in its next set of financial statements as post production was still underway when the latest set of filings was produced.

It is also important to stress that the financial statements of its production company don’t show the marketing costs of the movie as they are directly covered by Disney. Studios don’t disclose marketing costs and, even if they did, they could only be broad estimates at best. That’s because, as with any business, one of the biggest costs is staffing and members of studio marketing teams each work on multiple movies so it isn’t possible to allocate their cost to particular pictures.

The marketing costs will boost The Fantastic Four’s overall expenses but the fact that they are already lower than the spending on other major MCU movies is a significant achievement. It follows the recent revelation by this author in the London Evening Standard that Deadpool & Wolverine blew its budget with costs of more than half a billion dollars.

The 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes threw the filming of that movie into turmoil whereas The Fantastic Four hadn’t begun shooting by the time that the dispute began so it emerged largely unscathed. As a result, it reflects the cost-cutting drive that Marvel embarked on in recent years to reduce the studio’s risk after several high-profile flops.

In July Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige told Variety that it had been “grinding down the budget” and added that its latest movies “have been upwards of a third cheaper than they were two years before that”. It doesn’t look like that will last long as Disney’s next MCU movies are the Avengers Doomsday and Secret Wars super hero team ups which feature a cast list that reads like a roll call for the Oscars. It will take much more than the wave of Mickey’s magic wand (or a government reimbursement) to bring their costs down to the level of The Fantastic Four.