https://variety.com/2022/film/box-office/the-woman-king-opening-weekend-pearl-1235375499/
> The numbers for “Pearl” are rather humble, but the Mia Goth vehicle was filmed in a secret back-to-back production with “X,” which carried an itsy-bitsy reported $1 million budget before marketing. It’d be understandable to presume that “Pearl” was a similarly modest financial endeavor — a pathway to a final $10 million gross with video-on-demand sales on the horizon is probably a success story for the horror film.
Variety wouldn’t have had access to these tax credit filings when the article was written but these numbers just don’t add up.
|Film|Production Company|NZD Gross spend|NZD tax credit|USD NET ^1 |
:–|:–|–:|–:|–:|
|X|Dancing Pictures Limited|11,177,123|2,235,425|5.37M|
|Pearl|Powder Keg Farms Limited|8,001,529|1,600,306|3.84M|
[source](https://www.nzfilm.co.nz/sites/default/files/2024-02/Approved%20Screen%20Production%20Rebates%20-%20International%20%281%20Jan%202010%20-%2031st%20March%202024%29%29.pdf)
^1 Given the tax credits were redeemed in September 2022 and the exchange rate was 0.6 USD To 1 NZD during that month, I’ve elected to use the simplest conversion but during the time period in question exchange rate fluxuated between a low of ~.58 and a high of .72 so you could plausibly add ~ a million dollars to each film’s estimated net budget.
by SilverRoyce
3 Comments
I’m not surprised.
Who cares? They cost however much they cost. Don’t know what the point is digging deep into the financials to spin a narrative that the budget was underreported, but the fact he was able to get a trilogy of movies out of this concept is the only thing that matters ultimately.
Even with how small scale they were, I didn’t believe $1 million was the budget for each film. That’s insanely low.