‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Cost Half A Billion Dollars But Did It Make A Profit?

Disney has revealed that it spent more than half a billion dollars on 2024 adult action movie Deadpool & Wolverine and confirmed that its “final costs exceeded the production budget.” So did it make a profit?

It’s no secret that Deadpool & Wolverine was a hit at the box office. The movie grossed $1.34 billion making it the only one of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero movies to pass the billion dollar threshold post pandemic. Its bottom line wasn’t quite as punchy as this.

To calculate a studio’s profit when a picture plays in movie theaters its costs need to be deducted from its takings. Although Deadpool & Wolverine grossed $1.3 billion, Disney didn’t pocket all of this.

The amount that theaters pay to studios is known in the trade as a rental fee and an indication of the typical level comes from film industry consultant Stephen Follows who interviewed 1,235 film professionals in 2014 and concluded that, according to studios, theaters keep 49% of the takings on average.

This research lends weight to a widely-established 50-50 split which would give Disney $670 million from Deadpool & Wolverine. Then come the costs.

Deadpool & Wolverine stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the eponymous anti-heroes who are joined by a plethora of A List actors in cameo roles. The lineup includes Jennifer Garner, Chris Evans, Henry Cavill and Channing Tatum who don’t come cheap.

Exactly how much Disney spent on Deadpool & Wolverine was laid bare in a recent report by this author for the London Standard newspaper. The precise cost of movies made in the United States is usually a closely-guarded secret as studios combine them all in their overall expenses and don’t break out how much was spent on each one.

Movies made in the United Kingdom are a different story and Deadpool & Wolverine was one of them. The movie was largely shot at Pinewood Studios just outside London with a local quarry doubling for the dusty dystopian void where the title characters meet long-lost MCU stars. The filming location shines a spotlight on its costs.

Filming in the U.K. has a magic touch on movie budgets as the government reimburses studios up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country. Until last year the reimbursement came in the form of a cash tax credit but it is now counted as revenue. The key condition of receiving it is that at least 10% of the core costs of the production have to be incurred in the U.K. and in order to demonstrate this to the authorities, studios set up separate companies to produce each movie they make there.

These production companies are obliged to file legally-binding financial statements which lift the curtain on everything from the total costs and amount of reimbursement right down to the headcount and social security payments.

The Disney subsidiary behind Deadpool & Wolverine is called Richmond Street Productions UK, apparently in a nod to the movie’s cinematographer George Richmond. Its latest financial statements show that by October 31, 2024, three months after the movie debuted, Disney had spent a staggering $533.7 million (£418.1 million) on it making it one of the top ten most expensive films of all time. Filming was heavily disrupted by the actors’ and writers’ strikes in 2023 and perhaps as a result of this, the filings reveal that the “final costs exceeded the production budget.” However, that wasn’t the end of the story.

Disney banked a total of $104.7 million (£82 million) in tax credits and reimbursement bringing its net spending on the movie down to $429 million (£336.1 million). It points out that this spending benefits local U.K. businesses such as security, equipment hire, transport and catering firms. Last year Disney announced that since 2019 it has spent $4.8 billion (£3.5 billion) on production in the UK across 41 shows and 29 feature films supporting more than 32,000 jobs.

Deadpool & Wolverine paid $11.2 million (£9 million) to its staff who peaked at a monthly average of 105 employees, not including 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.

Deducting the $429 million net spending from Disney’s estimated $670 million share of the takings gives Deadpool & Wolverine a healthy profit of $241 million at the box office.

Nevertheless, the share of the box office isn’t a studio’s only return from a movie so offsetting it from the costs in the financial statements does not show whether it made a profit or a loss overall. As a Disney spokesperson told me last year, “there will be other income generated by the production (such as DVD/Blu Ray sales, merchandising, etc.). It’s not reflecting a true account of whether the film was overall profitable.”

Just as the production generates other income, it also incurs other costs, chief of which are the marketing expenses which are not shown in the financial statements of the production companies. Accordingly, if the home entertainment and merchandise sales should be added to the theater takings, the marketing cost should be deducted from them.

Disney declined to comment on the filings and doesn’t disclose how much it spends on marketing each picture. However, the film industry experts at That Park Place estimate that an “aggressive worldwide” marketing rollout (which perfectly describes the Deadpool & Wolverine campaign) can cost more than $200 million.

Merchandise and streaming sales are even harder to assess as it is tough to attribute them to specific productions. A great deal of the former for Deadpool & Wolverine carries the overall Marvel brand, rather than the names of specific movies and streaming viewers don’t pay to watch each one of them because they have monthly subscriptions.

These ancillary revenue streams cast a cloud of uncertainty over the movie’s overall bottom line and have also brought the movie into the crosshairs of campaigners.

Deadpool and Wolverine may be comic book characters who wear colorful costumes but the movie about them is anything but a childrens’ film. Rated R, it is filled with innuendos, bloody violence and glib references to drugs.

The adult themes are at the heart of many of the movie’s most outrageous in-jokes. Although it is the third Deadpool movie, it is the first one made by Disney. Its two prequels were equally edgy and were made by 20th Century Fox before the studio was sold to Disney in 2019. Since then several of Disney’s own Marvel films have flopped at the box office as they were seen as being increasingly aimed at kids.

To tempt back the adult audiences that grew up with the comics and made Marvel’s earlier movies smash hits, Disney made Deadpool & Wolverine as provocative as possible. It even mocks the fact that cocaine use was the only thing Marvel’s president Kevin Feige prevented from being shown on screen. The film turns that into a joke when Reynolds’ Deadpool character breaks the fourth wall by saying that he isn’t even allowed to refer to the drug by any slang terms which he proceeds to run through, culminating in ‘Do you want to build a snowman’ – a euphemism inspired by a song in Disney’s animated film Frozen.

“Associating drug references, however obliquely, with humor and cool ‘in jokes’, unwittingly makes drug use seem exciting and attractive to younger viewers, who will undoubtedly become familiar with the references via social media, even if they are not old enough to watch the latest film themselves,” says Sarah Brighton, chief executive of drug prevention and education charity Hope UK.

“The MCU creators, together with all parties who are involved in funding or supporting the film industry, have a responsibility to safeguard the wellbeing of young fans – children and young people who are going to be massively influenced by the movies and their movie stars.”

Further complicating matters, Disney sells toys of the characters in Deadpool & Wolverine who also appear on its cruise ships and in its theme parks as this author has reported in the Daily Mail. Deadpool and Wolverine are also expected to star in the MCU’s next two kid-friendly Avengers movies.

It seems a far cry from Marvel’s early days. In 1971 the comic book company published a pioneering Spider-Man story which sees the wall crawler’s best friend Harry Osborn begin abusing drugs. Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee wrote the story after the Department of Health, Education and Welfare asked Marvel to do an anti-drug story though, ironically, it wasn’t well received by the industry.

The Comics Code Authority (CCA), the industry’s regulatory body, refused to approve the issue from going on sale because of a strict rule against depiction of drug use. Marvel published it anyway and retailers carried it, ignoring the lack of approval, prompting the CCA to loosen its restrictions. Over the following decades drug usage surged and has become even more commonplace. So much so that a Marvel character now jokes about it on the silver screen.

Off screen, Marvel actor Josh Brolin admitted to using drugs in an interview last year. Brolin who plays Thanos, the big bad of Marvel’s most successful movies, admitted that when Marvel approached him about the role he said “I know nothing about cartoons”. His explanation for this is that when he was young he “was surfing and was doing drugs”.

Undeterred, Marvel handed him a “bible” about the character which caught his eye and the rest is history. There was a time a few decades ago when that kind of an admission from an actor could spell the end of their career. If times hadn’t changed, things could have turned out very different for Marvel.

Additional reporting by Chris Sylt