The Number One Netflix Movie That Blew Its Budget With $145.1 Million Costs

Hollywood is famous for its profligacy. A List actors are frequently paid eight figure sums and budgets of blockbuster movies often surge north of $300 million so it seems somewhat of a contradiction for a major studio to refer to a picture which only cost $145.1 million as blowing its budget. Not for Netflix.

The streamer has got such a close grip on its spending that it budgeted less than $145.1 million to make a movie starring an Oscar winner and one of Hollywood’s hottest young stars. What’s more, despite its modest budget it shot straight to number one in its first week of streaming and is one of Netflix’s top ten most-watched movies of all time.

That movie is Damsel, a dark spin on a classic fairytale which stars Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown as the eponymous heroine who agrees to marry a handsome prince, only to find that the ruling royal family has recruited her as a sacrifice to repay an ancient debt. Thrown into a cave with a fire-breathing dragon, she has to use her wits to escape to her parents played by Academy Award winner Angela Bassett and Ray Winstone.

Almost everything that could go wrong with the production did go wrong as principal photography was originally due to begin at the start of 2020 until the pandemic temporarily brought the curtain down on film shoots. It eventually got underway when Covid began to clear and filming wrapped in spring 2022. However, some shots were reportedly still remaining by the time that the SAG-AFTRA strikes got underway. They also prevented the film from being promoted leading to a delay to its original October 2023 release date.

In the end the last shots were finished in January 2024 and the movie was released just two months later. Initial feedback suggested that it wasn’t worth the wait as critics rated it just 56% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes whilst its audience score was only slightly better at 59%. The consensus from critics was that Damsel has an appealing action hero in Brown, whose “gutsy performance is often enough to balance the scales against the film’s underpowered story and occasionally unconvincing effects.” The audience concurred that Brown was a highlight but added that “it’s easy to tell where the story’s going and the CGI isn’t great.”

Some of its cast soon went into damage limitation mode with Brooke Carter, who plays Brown’s on-screen sister, telling CBR that “we filmed two different endings for the film…And I feel like it would be great for them to see the other ending that we filmed.”

She added “there were a lot of changes. I think we changed quite a bit of it. I mean, the storyline from the start to the middle stayed the same. The ending changed quite a lot. A lot of lines were cut, and a lot of lines were added. So when we were doing the reshoots, there were quite a lot of scenes that they’d swapped out for other scenes.”

Against the odds, Damsel was an overnight success as it amassed 35.3 million views in its first three days making it the number one Netflix movie in 79 countries. Between its March debut and the end of June, total views rose to 143 million, giving it the accolade of being the most-watched Netflix film for the first half of 2024. It didn’t stop there and still stands as the eighth most-watched English-language movie of all time on Netflix with a total of 138 million views and 253 million hours viewed.

Although its costs remained relatively reasonable compared to competitors, they still surged due to the reshoots and the impact of this recently came to light. Although the film is set in a fairytale world of days gone by, it was actually filmed on two sound stages and in the gardens of the United Kingdom’s historic Pinewood Studios. The cave scenes were shot at London’s Troubadour Meridian Water Studios which were also used by Cruella and Morbius from Disney and Sony respectively. It shines a spotlight on how much it cost to make Damsel.

Budgets of movies are usually a closely-guarded secret as studios tend to absorb the costs of individual pictures in their overall expenses and don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. Netflix didn’t respond to an opportunity to comment for this report and it didn’t need to because the amount it spent on Damsel is laid bare in its own filings.

Studios shoot in the U.K. to benefit from the government’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country.

To qualify for the reimbursement, at least 10% of the production costs need to relate to activities in the U.K. In order to prove to the government how much money they spent in the U.K., studios set up a separate production company there for each movie they make. The companies have to file financial statements which reveal everything from the headcount and salaries to the total costs and the level of reimbursement. It takes a bit of detective work to get the information.

The companies usually have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing permits to film on location. Tallying the company names with the productions they are responsible for requires deep industry knowledge which my colleague and I have built up over nearly 15 years. We are the only reporters 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.

The financial statements have a public interest in the U.K. media as the reimbursement to the studios comes from taxpayers’ money. Outside the U.K. the interest is in the bigger picture production costs.

The Netflix subsidiary behind Damsel is called Orchid Productions and as with all U.K. companies, its financial statements are released in stages long after the period they relate to. It explains why its latest filings are for the year ending 31 December 2023. That covers the vast majority of filming and post production so it gives an almost-complete picture of the spending on the movie.

The financial statements show that by the end of 2023, the cost of making the movie came to $145.1 million (£116.6 million) with one of the biggest single expenses being the $10 million (£8.1 million) spent on staff which peaked at 91 people. As with any film shoot, the vast majority of the crew were freelancers, contractors and temporary workers who don’t appear on the production company’s books as employees.

Netflix made the most of its entitlements in the U.K. as the government reimbursed it $35.9 million (£28.7 million) for Damsel which came to 24.6% of the total spend. This brought Netflix’s net spending on the movie down to $109.2 million and it made an impact.

The latest data from the British Film Institute (BFI) shows that in 2019, every $1.31 (£1) of reimbursement handed to studios generated $10.88 (£8.30) of additional Gross Value Added (GVA) benefit for the U.K. economy. It led to a total of $10.1 billion (£7.7 billion) in GVA being generated by the fiscal incentives for film in 2019.

Released in December 2021, the BFI’s triennial Screen Business report showed that between 2017 and 2019, the fiscal incentives to studios generated a record $17.7 billion (£13.5 billion) of return on investment to the UK economy and created more jobs than ever before. Filming in the U.K. doesn’t just create jobs for locals, it also drives spending on services such as security, equipment hire, transport and catering.

In 2019, this generated 37,685 jobs in London and 7,775 throughout the rest of the U.K. The report added that when the wider impacts of the film content value chain are taken into consideration, 49,845 jobs were created in London in 2019 and 19,085 throughout the rest of the U.K.

Despite Hollywood being gripped by strikes for more than six months in 2023, the U.K. still got a magic touch from the fiscal incentives as foreign studios contributed around 77% of the $1.8 billion (£1.4 billion) spent on making films there. Between 2020 and 2023 Netflix alone invested almost $6 billion in the U.K. shooting shows and films. As long as the rich rewards for studios remain in place, that total seems set to rise.