Sometimes, being described as one of the most expensive movies of all time is not a descriptor that studios want to be branded on a film. Though plenty of the most expensive titles have gone on to be blockbusters that make billions of dollars and fully justify the cost of the production, there are just as many that have proven to be gargantuan boondoggles. One of these titles is Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, a film that reportedly cost $379 million, and though it made over a billion dollars, it’s often considered the worst film in the entire series.
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For over a decade now, the film that has held the title of the most expensive movie of all time has been Walt Disney and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The highly anticipated “Episode Seven” of the franchise revived the series in a major way and came with a price tag of over $638.9 million when all was said and done. A new report now reveals that new financial statements from Hollywood studios have revealed an all-new movie that has taken the title from Star Wars, and the problem is that this one is much closer to a disaster than a beloved movie. The new king is officially 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion, the sixth film in the series that carries the lowest rating on Rotten Tomatoes out of the entire franchise by twenty points.
Jurassic World: Dominion Becomes the Most Expensive Movie Ever Made
A new report from Fortune confirms that Jurassic World: Dominion has taken the title of “Most Expensive Movie Ever Made” from Star Wars: The Force Awakens thanks to a recently filed financial statement from Universal Pictures. According ot the outlet, Jurassic World Dominion has nabbed the crown thanks to its staggering price tag of $658.8 million, clearing The Force Awakens‘ reported price tag by nearly $20 million. Though this cost is an incalculable amount of money for most, the fact of the matter is that there’s actually a reason for it.
Production on Jurassic World: Dominion began in February of 2020, a timeframe that should immediately ring alarm bells in the mind of anyone alive for the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though filming on the sequel was paused in March, production on the sequel eventually resumed that summer. As a result, Jurassic World: Dominion‘s budget ballooned from the cost of needing to be prepared for new safety protocols that were being created for film sets while a vaccine hadn’t been released.
It goes even deeper than that, though, with the production also needing to continue paying for the studio spaces it was renting, as well as equipment and key production members. According to the outlet, the cost of housing the cast of Jurassic World Dominion during that time quickly added up too, noting that the entire cast of the film (including stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and original stars Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill) were all staying at a hotel that cost $600 a night.
Though the larger context of filming during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic is a clear reason why the cost of Jurassic World: Dominion would rise as high as it did, the numbers are still shocking to see, especially when you consider that it’s a movie almost no one likes.
As of this writing, Jurassic World: Dominion has a 28% approval rating on critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 19 points below the second-lowest, 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, but far and away the least-liked movie of the entire series. Even fans of the Jurassic Park/World movies regard it as one of (if not THE) worst in the franchise. A major complaint about the film is that, at the end of the day, its larger plot has nothing to do with dinosaurs, or the fact that they’re freely roaming the world, but instead is mostly about genetically engineered locusts.
Even wilder than the fact that Jurassic World: Dominion is now the most expensive movie ever made, is that Universal actually still managed to make money from it. Thanks to the tax incentives that the production received from filming primarily in the UK (which is also the reason that much of this data has even been released), Universal managed to get more than $120 million in reimbursement from the UK government, bringing their total cost for the movie down to $531 million. This, combined with the profits from home media sales, plus toys and the like, means that the film actually turned a bit of a profit.
It’s worth noting that the Jurassic series didn’t end there, but also that Universal may have learned its lesson with those overwhelming costs. 2025’s Jurassic World Rebirth marked the next film in the series, and the film’s reported budget is nearly a third of Dominion‘s, with Fortune confirming it to be $254.2 million. Though Rebirth marked the lowest-grossing of the four “World” movies, it still brought in over $850 million globally and did well enough to have the studio begin developing a sequel.
The only question left pondering now is, when will a movie come along that actually breaks this record now held by Jurassic World: Dominion? When The Force Awakens took the title, it nabbed it from the aforementioned Pirates movie, holding it for over a decade. Looking to the future, though, there are at least two movies that immediately seem like they could contend for the title in some way, with Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars almost certainly going to cost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
We may not know how much those two movies actually cost for a few years, though, but since both of them are being shot in the UK, it will force the disclosure of costs in order to qualify for the same tax incentives. For now, though, Jurassic World Dominion is the top of the food chain.
