The 7 Most Expensive Movies in History Aren’t What You Expected

The 2024-2025 award season was all about costs. Specifically, indie filmmakers like The Brutalist‘s Brady Corbet and Anora‘s Sean Baker raised vital questions about why major Hollywood movies cost so much. Even when adjusting for inflation, modern blockbusters leave classic costly blockbusters like Cleopatra and the first Christopher Reeve Superman in the dust. In today’s world of major studio cinema, even Joker: Folie a Deux can cost over $200 million. No wonder folks like Corbet and Baker are sounding the alarm on this phenomenon. Given these exorbitant budgets, it’s worth asking which motion pictures have really tipped the scales of Hollywood.

Which films now hold the honor of being the most expensive movies in history? The seven current record-holders of being the costliest features in motion picture history were all released after 2010 and reflect an increasingly bloated, extravagant cinema scene. If you want to really feel how excessive costs have gotten for modern movies, just look at the reported budgets of these seven movies.

Avengers: Endgame — $356 million

The big conclusion to the Infinity Saga was such a taxing creative endeavor that Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame were shot back-to-back across 2017. This expansive process resulted in Endgame securing an alleged $356 million budget. That cost was inevitable thanks to the massive cast and avalanche of visual effects wizardry needed to pull this movie off. Shockingly, though, Endgame, even with its immense costs and pop culture significance, isn’t either the costliest MCU movie or Avengers installment. 

Avengers: Age of Ultron — $365 million

Phase One of the MCU resorted to mostly modest budgets save for the $200+ million costs of Iron Man 2 and The Avengers. Once Avengers: Age of Ultron, the sequel to one of the biggest movies in history, rolled around, though, Marvel Studios took the budgetary gloves off. This movie racked up a massive $365-million budget, a pricetag likely made possible thanks to factors like the extensive overseas filming done for the project, the development of new visual effects technology, and a challenging post-production period. Thankfully for all involved at Marvel, Age of Ultron nearly quadrupled its massive $365 million cost with a $1.4 billion worldwide gross. 

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — $379 million

Pirates of the Caribbean movies don’t come cheap. Shooting these titles on practical, water-heavy locations inevitably inspires costly problems evoking the expensive overruns incurred on Jaws in the ’70s. For Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, extra complications emerged from the insistence on shooting the feature with digital 3D cameras out in practical locations as well as the costs of getting Johnny Depp to return as Jack Sparrow. In the end, On Stranger Tides reportedly cost $379 million to make. That towering total not only made On Stranger Tides the first movie in history to cost $350+ million, but also briefly made this tentpole the most expensive movie in history.  

Fast X — $379 million

Remember when the Fast & Furious movies were about street racing? Those days of modestly budgeted Point Break pastiches were firmly left in the dust by the time Fast X zoomed into theaters in May 2023. This sequel experienced endless problems coming to the big screen, including original director Justin Lin leaving the production early into principal photography. The extensive costs of getting the film back on track, not to mention paying each member of Fast X’s extensive star-studded ensemble cast, eventually produced a gargantuan $379-million budget. For comparison’s sake, Fast Five cost $125 million to make just 12 years earlier.

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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker — $416 million

Nobody at Disney was expecting any of the sequel trilogy Star Wars movies to be thrifty productions. After all, Star Wars titles are all about grand spectacle and boundary-pushing visual effects. However, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker had to be much more expensive than anyone at the Mouse House expected. Scrambling to get the project assembled to meet a December 2019 deadline once Colin Trevorrow left the project already was costly. Meanwhile, multiple rounds of reshoots couldn’t have come cheaply for this star-studded feature. In the end, The Rise of Skywalker reportedly cost $416 million to make yet became the second-lowest grossing Disney Star Wars movie worldwide.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — $432 million

Starting in 2014, Universal Pictures committed itself to realizing its movies on the cheap (save for the Fast & Furious movies). This was the studio known for cost-efficient Blumhouse and Illumination titles, after all. Even 2023’s Oppenheimer only cost $100 million to produce. A staggering exception to this was the $432-million budget of 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. It’s unclear what specific factors drove the budget so high, but it is clear that the Jurassic Park saga had come a long way from the $63-million budget of the original Jurassic Park. It was also clear Universal’s cost-conscious filmmaking style couldn’t contain Fallen Kingdom.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens — $447 million

The first live-action Star Wars film to grace movie theater screens in a decade, Star Wars: The Force Awakens pulled out all the stops to provide people with the practical effects wizardry and grandeur audiences once associated with the Star Wars saga. That was always going to be a pricey endeavor, but The Force Awakens had extra problems impacting its budget, including an unexpected filming interruption when Harrison Ford suffered an on-set injury. In the end, The Force Awakens reportedly cost $447 million to make, though it turned out to be well worth the costs once it cleared $2 billion worldwide.

Are you surprised these films were so expensive? Let us know in the comments below!