Fireworks Budget

What Is the Budget of Fireworks (2022)?

Fireworks, originally released in Italy as Stranizza d'amuri, is a 2022-completed Sicilian romantic drama written and directed by Giuseppe Fiorello in his feature directorial debut. The film was financed by Ibla Film and 11 Marzo Film with support from Rai Cinema and the Sicily Film Commission. As an independent Italian-language debut with a largely unknown cast of teenage leads, no formal production budget figure has been publicly disclosed by the producers or by Italian trade press.

Comparable Italian regional productions of similar scope, period set dressing, and 134-minute runtime typically operate in the 3,000,000 EUR to 6,000,000 EUR range, but no audited figure has been confirmed for Fireworks. The film recouped through a combination of Italian theatrical receipts, international festival sales handled by Pulsar Content, and streaming licensing in territories including the United States, where it was acquired by Strand Releasing for a 2024 theatrical and on-demand rollout.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Fireworks's production budget was distributed across several core cost categories:

• Above-the-Line Talent: Director Giuseppe Fiorello, a working Italian actor making his directorial debut, deferred a significant portion of his fee. Leads Samuele Segreto and Gabriele Pizzurro were newcomers cast in a region-wide Sicilian search, keeping above-the-line costs low compared with a name-driven Italian release.
• Sicily Location Shoot: Principal photography in 2022 covered the towns of Noto, Avola, and Pachino in the Syracuse and Ragusa provinces of southeastern Sicily. The shoot required period vehicle dressing, 1980s-appropriate set decoration, and the temporary removal of contemporary signage from public squares.
• Period Wardrobe and Production Design: Recreating early-1980s working-class Sicily, including a fireworks-merchant family compound and a coastal small town, demanded a dedicated wardrobe department, vintage prop sourcing, and exterior dressing for multiple village locations.
• Music and Score: Original score by Giovanni Caccamo and Leonardo Milani, plus needle drops from 1980s Italian pop covering the 1982 World Cup era during which the film is set, required composition fees and licensing.
• Festival and Marketing Costs: A Tribeca Film Festival international premiere in June 2023, followed by international festival travel and Italian theatrical marketing, added meaningful post-production carrying costs ahead of the March 2023 domestic release.
• Tax Credits and Regional Incentives: The production benefited from Italian film tax credits administered through the Ministero della Cultura and from Sicily Film Commission location grants. These offsets are standard for southern Italian regional productions and were a material part of the financing stack.

How Does Fireworks's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

Fireworks sits in the small-budget tier of contemporary European LGBTQ period dramas. Useful reference points include:

• Call Me by Your Name (2017): Budget $3,500,000 | Worldwide $41,841,464. Luca Guadagnino's Italian-set romance operated on a comparable indie scale but reached far wider audiences through Sony Pictures Classics' awards campaign.
• Carol (2015): Budget $11,800,000 | Worldwide $40,393,170. A higher-end period drama with star talent that illustrates the budget ceiling for prestige LGBTQ romance.
• God's Own Country (2017): Budget approximately $1,000,000 | Worldwide $1,983,000. A British rural LGBTQ debut at a budget tier likely closer to Fireworks, with a similar festival-driven release pattern.
• The Eight Mountains (2022): Budget approximately 8,000,000 EUR | Worldwide $7,200,000. An Italian co-production from the same release window providing a domestic budget benchmark.
• Beautiful Thing (1996): Budget under $1,000,000 | Worldwide gross unreported. The closest spiritual precursor in working-class teen-romance scale.

Fireworks Box Office Performance

Fireworks opened in Italian theaters on March 23, 2023, distributed by 01 Distribution, grossing roughly 1,150,000 EUR domestically across its theatrical run. Strand Releasing rolled the film out in the United States in January 2024 under the title Fireworks, with a platform release in New York and Los Angeles followed by select arthouse expansion. No comprehensive worldwide gross has been audited by Box Office Mojo or The Numbers, but Italian box office data and limited US receipts indicate a worldwide theatrical take in the low single-digit millions of dollars.

Against an undisclosed production budget, the financial breakdown is as follows:

• Production Budget: not publicly disclosed
• Estimated Prints & Advertising (P&A): approximately $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 across Italy and select international territories
• Total Estimated Investment: not calculable without verified production figure
• Worldwide Gross: approximately $1,500,000 (Italy plus limited US)
• Net Return: not calculable
• ROI: not calculable

The film's economic case rests less on theatrical recoupment than on streaming licensing, awards-cycle prestige, and festival sales. The Tribeca international premiere and subsequent Italian David di Donatello and Nastro d'Argento attention secured strong arthouse interest, and Fireworks has played extensively at LGBTQ film festivals worldwide.

Fireworks Production History

Giuseppe Fiorello, the Italian actor known for television leads in series such as Il Coraggio di Angela and Gli Orologi del Diavolo, developed Fireworks over several years as his feature directorial debut. The screenplay, co-written by Fiorello with Andrea Cedrola and Carlo Salsa, is loosely inspired by the 1980 Giarre murders, in which two young Sicilian men, Giorgio Agatino Giammona and Antonio Galatola, were found dead in circumstances widely understood within the Sicilian gay community of the era to be linked to their relationship. The case is considered a foundational moment in the modern Italian LGBTQ rights movement.

Principal photography ran in summer 2022 in southeastern Sicily, with locations in Noto, Avola, Pachino, and the surrounding Syracuse province. Cinematographer Ramiro Civita shot on widescreen anamorphic to capture the dry coastal landscape that gives the film its visual character. The score by Giovanni Caccamo and Leonardo Milani blended Sicilian folk instrumentation with contemporary orchestral cues, and the production licensed period-appropriate Italian pop including tracks associated with the 1982 World Cup that bookends the narrative.

Fireworks world-premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival market in early 2023, then played the Tribeca Film Festival international competition in June 2023. Italian release followed on March 23, 2023, with Strand Releasing handling US distribution under the international title beginning in January 2024.

Awards and Recognition

Fireworks received significant Italian awards recognition. Giuseppe Fiorello won the 2023 Nastro d'Argento for Best New Director and received a David di Donatello nomination in the same category. The film also received David di Donatello nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Original Song. At the Globi d'Oro awards from the foreign press in Italy, Fireworks won the Best Screenplay prize.

Internationally, the film received the Audience Award at the BFI Flare LGBTIQ+ Film Festival in London, the Best International Feature award at the Outfest LGBTQ+ Film Festival in Los Angeles, and major prizes at queer cinema festivals in Lisbon, Barcelona, and Sao Paulo. The accumulated festival run has made Fireworks one of the most-awarded Italian LGBTQ feature debuts of the past decade.

Critical Reception

Fireworks has been critically embraced. The film holds a 100 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 9 critic reviews with an average rating of 7.9 out of 10. Metacritic and CinemaScore have not aggregated scores for the film due to its limited US release, but festival press across Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Screen Daily uniformly praised the performances of Samuele Segreto and Gabriele Pizzurro and the historical specificity of Fiorello's screenplay.

The Washington Blade called it "a romantic mood piece set against the brutality of small-town homophobia," while Variety praised Fiorello's "unforced empathy for both his lovers and the families who fail them." Screen Daily highlighted the film as "a confident feature debut that earns its emotional climax through patience rather than rhetoric," and Italian critics widely cited the connection to the Giarre case as giving the film an unusual moral weight for a debut Italian romance.