Marvel Star Reveals Reason For Surging Movie Costs

When the history books are written they will leave little doubt about which movie triggered the decline in popularity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). That honor goes to 2021’s Black Widow and, to be fair, the odds couldn’t have been stacked much higher against it.

It was Marvel Studios’ first movie following Avengers: Endgame which claimed the crown of being the highest-grossing film in history with total takings of $2.8 billion. Those big boots were made even harder to fill by the fact that Black Widow was a prequel story, set long before Endgame, about a character who died in that movie. It meant that her eponymous story lacked tension as audiences knew she would make it through the movie. That’s just the start.

Black Widow was originally due to debut in May 2020 but Covid put paid to that. The pandemic brought the curtain down on movie theaters all over the world and led to repeated delays in release schedules.

By the time that theater doors started to swing open again, takings were a shadow of their pre-pandemic highs as many movie-goers didn’t want to be stuck in a confined space near to potentially-infected people. Attendance was so low that many theaters remained shuttered and Black Widow paid the price.

The spy story starred Scarlett Johansson as the eponymous Avenger who fights alongside Florence Pugh against General Dreykov, an evil Russian dictator played by Ray Winstone. It was one of the first major post-pandemic titles from any studio and grossed just $379.8 million, the lowest tally of all but three of the 37 MCU movies. However, that only tells half of the story.

Mindful of the fact that theater occupancy was still far off pre-pandemic levels, Marvel took the controversial decision of deciding to put the movie on its Disney+ streaming platform at the same time. It charged subscribers an additional fee of $29.99 to access new releases for a month and called the service Premier Access. It reportedly made more than $125 million in online revenue for Black Widow but still wasn’t a dream ticket for Marvel’s owner, Disney.

Deadline claimed that Premier Access contributed to an increase in piracy and when theaters finally reopened, The National Association of Theatre Owners blamed it for a fall in box office receipts. Theaters weren’t the only ones who lost out as a result of it.

Actors who were due to get a cut of the theater takings were also hit by the decision to put new releases straight on Disney+. It famously led to Johansson suing Disney in July 2021 with sources telling The Wall Street Journal that she had lost more than $50 million because of Marvel’s Premier Access release strategy. Johansson settled her suit in October 2021 but by then the odds were stacked even higher against Black Widow.

The movie reportedly underwent reshoots in early 2020, a fact which was later confirmed by its cast. It was thought that this had contributed to Black Widow blowing its budget and there was strong evidence for this.

Despite being set everywhere from Ohio to Hungary and Saint Petersburg in Russia, the movie was actually made in the United Kingdom and this shines a spotlight on its costs. Studios filming in the U.K. get a reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country provided that at least 10% of their core costs are incurred there. In order to demonstrate this to the authorities, studios set up separate companies to produce each film in the U.K. and they are obliged to file legally-binding earnings releases.

The Disney subsidiary behind Black Widow is called Romanoff Productions UK in a nod to the heroine’s alter ego, Natasha Romanoff. Its November 2019 earnings release confirmed that the “cost of the film was in line with the budget”. However, after the reshoots, the company filed another earnings release in October 2020 which stated that it was now “in excess of the budget” with its total costs eventually coming to $296.7 million (£232.3 million).

Of course, how much of a role the reshoots had in the movie going over budget depends on how extensive they were and there hasn’t been any indication of this. Until now.

Talking at the recent Sarajevo Film Festival, Winstone described his initial experience of working on the movie under its “amazing” director Cate Shortland as being “probably the best thing I’ve done for a really long time.” However, it didn’t stop there.

Winstone says that after finishing the job he got a call from Shortland saying that some reshoots were needed. “I say: how many scenes? [Cate] says ‘all of them.’ So I said she should recast [the role], but I was contracted, so I had to do it. I go back, they do my hair all nice, put me in the suit, and I couldn’t do it. I’d already done it. I thought, ‘I’m not doing it now. I’ve done it. That’s how it’s going to be.’ That’s rejection, you know? There’s nothing worse than doing something, leaving it on the floor, and then being told it’s not right.”

With entire key roles being reshot it’s perhaps no surprise the movie blew its budget. That approach has changed in recent years and in an interview with Variety, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige said that after costs began to balloon in the wake of the pandemic, Marvel “started grinding down the budget”.

He added that the studio’s latest slate of films “have been upwards of a third cheaper than they were two years before that.” That’s as may be but Marvel’s next movies, Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, are expected to be amongst the most-expensive pictures in history thanks to their colossal cast list which reads like a roll call for the Oscars. So, yet again, the odds are stacked against Marvel and time will tell whether its mightiest heroes have got what it takes to tempt enough moviegoers through theater turnstiles.