High Flying Bird Budget

What Is the Budget of High Flying Bird (2019)?

High Flying Bird (2019), directed by Steven Soderbergh and distributed by Netflix, was produced on a reported budget of $2,000,000. The film is Soderbergh's second project shot entirely on an iPhone 8, following his 2018 horror experiment Unsane, and the second collaboration between the director and writer Tarell Alvin McCraney following the Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016). Federation Studios financed the production, with Netflix acquiring worldwide distribution rights in September 2018 ahead of the January 2019 Slamdance premiere.

The $2,000,000 figure represents Soderbergh's continued exploration of how digital cinematography and minimal crew can support feature filmmaking at studio-quality narrative scale. The investment was concentrated in cast salaries and post-production rather than camera, lighting, or location overhead, allowing Soderbergh to deliver a Netflix-original feature for roughly one tenth of a comparable theatrical drama.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

High Flying Bird's $2,000,000 budget was allocated across the following primary categories:

• Above-the-Line Talent: André Holland (Moonlight, Castle Rock) anchored the film as agent Ray Burke, supported by Zazie Beetz (Atlanta, Deadpool 2), Melvin Gregg, Sonja Sohn (The Wire), Bill Duke, and Kyle MacLachlan. Tarell Alvin McCraney's screenwriting fee, modest by post-Moonlight standards, reflected his and Soderbergh's shared commitment to keeping the production accessible.
• iPhone-Driven Cinematography: The film was shot on iPhone 8 smartphones equipped with Moondog Labs anamorphic adapter lenses and operated through the FiLMic Pro video app. This approach eliminated traditional camera rental, grip and electric overhead, and the large unit footprint typical of feature drama, while delivering 2.40:1 widescreen capture suitable for theatrical and streaming presentation.
• Manhattan Production: The 14-day shoot ran across New York City locations in February and March 2018, including hotel suites, corporate office interiors, and Brooklyn street exteriors. Without traditional lighting trucks or camera support, the unit moved between locations with minimal disruption, capturing extended dialogue scenes in real interiors that a conventional production would have required to recreate on stage.
• Real-Player Interview Inserts: The film is punctuated by documentary-style interviews with current NBA players Donovan Mitchell, Reggie Jackson, and Karl-Anthony Towns, captured separately and intercut with the narrative. The interview production required modest fees and travel for each player and added authenticity to the film's commentary on player-league economic dynamics.
• Post-Production: Soderbergh personally edited the film under his usual pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard. Composer David Wilder Savage provided original music. Color grading by Andre De Jesus reproduced the iPhone footage to a finish indistinguishable from conventional digital cinema cameras at typical streaming bitrates.
• Distribution Marketing: Netflix handled global marketing and rollout, including the February 8, 2019 streaming debut. The marketing campaign emphasized both the Soderbergh-Moonlight pedigree and the iPhone production technique, generating critical and industry press attention.

How Does High Flying Bird's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At $2,000,000, High Flying Bird sits among the lowest-budgeted features by an A-list American director in recent memory, illustrating Soderbergh's continued experimentation with cost-efficient digital production:

• Unsane (2018): Budget $1,500,000 | Worldwide $14,290,750. Soderbergh's previous iPhone feature shows the model in action, with a horror genre release expanding the budget multiple meaningfully through Bleecker Street's wide US theatrical release.
• Tangerine (2015): Budget $100,000 | Worldwide $702,663. Sean Baker's landmark iPhone 5s indie remains the benchmark for the format and helped establish the technique that Soderbergh refined.
• Moonlight (2016): Budget $4,000,000 | Worldwide $65,308,243. The previous McCraney-Holland collaboration cost twice as much but earned a Best Picture Oscar and was shot on traditional Arri Alexa cameras.
• Marriage Story (2019): Budget $18,000,000 | Worldwide approximately $2,000,000 (limited theatrical). Netflix's other 2019 awards-targeted drama cost nine times what High Flying Bird did and reached a substantially larger audience because of its conventional shoot and prestige campaign.

High Flying Bird Box Office Performance

High Flying Bird premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival on January 27, 2019 and debuted on Netflix globally on February 8, 2019. The film did not receive a traditional theatrical run; Netflix offered a small awards-qualifying booking in Los Angeles and New York consistent with its 2019 strategy, but the film was conceived as a streaming-first release.

Against the reported production budget, the financial breakdown is as follows:

• Production Budget: $2,000,000 (reported)
• Estimated Prints & Advertising (P&A): approximately $3,000,000 to $5,000,000 (streaming-focused)
• Total Estimated Investment: approximately $5,000,000 to $7,000,000
• Worldwide Gross: not measured (streaming-first release)
• Net Return: profitable for Netflix on a per-subscriber engagement basis
• ROI: measured by Netflix internally through viewership and critical reception

Netflix has declined to publish viewership figures for the film. Industry observers note that High Flying Bird's commercial value to the platform was driven less by raw streaming numbers and more by the company's strategic positioning as a director-friendly home for established auteurs, a positioning that paid dividends in the years that followed with films from Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, and Alfonso Cuarón.

High Flying Bird Production History

Steven Soderbergh announced his second iPhone feature in October 2017, the same month that André Holland was first announced as lead. Tarell Alvin McCraney delivered the screenplay drawing on his experience as a Black artistic professional negotiating institutional power structures in mostly-white industries, with the NBA labor dynamic serving as a focused dramatic vehicle for those concerns. Soderbergh and McCraney positioned the film as a thematic companion to Moonlight rather than a sequel.

Principal photography ran from late February through mid-March 2018, with the unit shooting across New York City locations. Soderbergh used Moondog Labs anamorphic lenses adapted for iPhone 8 capture and recorded video through the FiLMic Pro app, an approach that allowed the small crew to operate in hotel suites, corporate office interiors, and Brooklyn streets without the disruption a conventional production would have caused. The compressed 14-day schedule was enabled by the minimal lighting, grip, and unit logistics overhead that the iPhone format permits.

Netflix acquired worldwide distribution rights in September 2018 from Federation Studios. The film premiered at Slamdance, the alternative festival running concurrently with Sundance in Park City, on January 27, 2019, and was released globally on Netflix on February 8.

Awards and Recognition

High Flying Bird won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival. The film received Independent Spirit Awards nominations the following year, including a Best Male Lead nomination for André Holland, although the film did not convert any of the nominations to wins.

At the African-American Film Critics Association Awards, Holland received a Best Actor nomination, and the film earned a Best Screenplay nomination for Tarell Alvin McCraney. The picture was not a major contender at the Academy Awards or Golden Globes, with Netflix instead focusing its 2019 awards campaign on Roma and The Irishman.

Critical Reception

High Flying Bird received highly positive reviews. The film holds a 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 159 critic reviews, with the critical consensus calling it "a sharp and stylish reminder of [Soderbergh's] gift for working within an indie framework." On Metacritic the film scored 78 out of 100 across 31 critics, indicating generally favorable reviews. CinemaScore data is not available because the film did not receive a traditional theatrical release.

Critics consistently singled out André Holland's lead performance and McCraney's dialogue-heavy screenplay. The New York Times' A.O. Scott described Holland as delivering "a quiet, watchful, ruthlessly intelligent performance," and the Los Angeles Times' Justin Chang wrote that the film "unfolds with the steady, internal rhythm of a particularly tense business negotiation that nonetheless never forgets its higher subject."

Sports-press reaction was equally positive. The Ringer's Bill Simmons called the film "the smartest cinematic treatment of NBA labor economics ever made," and ESPN The Magazine ran a feature piece on McCraney's research process. The mixed legacy of the iPhone production technique drew most of the technical criticism: some reviewers felt the format introduced occasional visual softness in low-light scenes, while others noted that the constraint forced a more conversational, character-driven blocking that benefited the screenplay's verbal sparring.