Summer movie lineups are almost always going to feature the most expensive projects of any given year, and the upcoming 2025 movies slate is no different, from the live-action How to Train Your Dragon (read our review!) to a Jurassic sequel to Marvel's first family hoping to bring in massive box office results to match their budgets. So it also goes for James Gunn's Superman, which has the added pressure of launching the live-action DCU. But how much will its final cost actually be?
At this point, still a month out from its July release date, the specifics are still unclear, but what is clear is that there's a lack of agreement on how just how costly Superman's production and marketing campaign will amount to, and how it'll compare to other tentpole releases. Apple's theatrical push for Brad Pitt's F1 is expected to come in between $300 and $400 million, with incentives and tax rebates potentially taking a chunk of that out, and Superman's budget is thought to be in that same window, depending on who one listens to.
The reason there's even a debate, as it were, over the dollar signs going into David Corenswet's Man of Steel is due in part to documents filed in Ohio by the Superman production team in 2024, which put a pretty specific number on the budget, which sparked a public clapback from the director.
Here's a rundown of the back and forth, with the latter two financial totals coming via THR
- Filed Documents: $363 million
- James Gunn: “How in the world do they think they know what our budget is?”
- DC: Net $225 million
- Financial Insider: Points back to $363 million
What seems likely enough here is that $225 million went into the production itself, and to pay off everyone who worked on it, and that when all of the advertising and marketing and the initial merchandising waves are said and done, the budget will be pushed to somewhere closer to the $350-$363 million mark.
However you look at it, I think most people would agree that's a lot of money. But in some ways, it does make sense for a globally established title like Superman to skew higher than normal with its budget, because there's more confidence in how well the film can be marketed even after the theatrical run. As one studio veteran said:
When looking at the performance of a film that is one segment of a franchise property, you have to look holistically at the franchise as a whole and remember that each installment augments the overall performance of the prior films and the general IP itself. Franchise films drive multiple revenue streams across the entire library including streaming, home entertainment, and global content distribution.
So if Superman ends up bringing in over $1 billion at the box office, and then manages to bring Blu-ray sales back up while also drawing massive upticks in HBO Max subscriptions, and then other upcoming DC movies follow suit and also starts raking in the cash through theatrical releases and video games and coloring books and more....then maybe everyone will agree that its budget probably wasn't all that high to begin with.
Here at a point in time before all that happens, though, that number still looks pretty big, even if no one can agree on what it actually is. Which. means every living Superman fan should show up in theaters when the DCU crashlands into theaters on July 11, 2025.
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