Search icon

Movies & TV

22nd May 2023

A 2015 movie has suddenly become the most expensive movie ever made

Rory Cashin

most expensive movies

One 2023 release has also become one of the 10 most expensive movies ever made.

Over its opening week, Fast X banked $318.9 million worldwide, immediately jumping to the top of the box office in pretty much every country it showed in.

While that is an impressive number, it needs to be balanced against the fact that the movie cost $340 million to produce, which doesn’t include a single penny spent on advertising or promotions, which (as a rule of thumb) would be equal to the production budget.

Up until very recently, that would’ve put Fast X in the top five most expensive movies ever made, but a recent report reveals that a number of blockbusters from the last decade or so have only submitted their finalised budgets in recent weeks, adding hundreds of millions to the overall costs.

As reported by Forbes, 2015 release Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens has now become the most expensive movie ever made.

It is said to have cost $533.2 million to produce, although thanks to tax breaks for filming in the UK, that cost was reduced by $86.2 million.

That is remarkably higher than the reported $245 million budget that was announced when the film initially hit cinemas, and this figure also doesn’t include any promotional costs.

And it obviously paid off, as The Force Awakens went on to make $2.071 billion at the global box office, not to mention how much additional profit from home media, merchandising and every Star Wars sequel and spin-off to arrive since then.

Other movies to only recently update their final budgets include the Jurassic World sequels and more entries in the Star Wars franchise. Here are the ten most expensive movies ever made, at the time of writing:

1 – Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens – $447 million

2 – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – $432 million

3 – Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker – $416 million

4- Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides – $379 million

5 – Avengers: Age of Ultron – $365 million

6 – Avengers: Endgame – $356 million

7 – Avatar: The Way of Water – $350 million

8 – Fast X – $340 million

9 – Avengers: Infinity War – $325 million

Joint 10 – Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End / Justice League / Solo: A Star Wars Story – $300 million

Related articles:

LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Conor Sketches | Tiger Woods loves Ger Loughnane and cosplaying as Charles LeClerc