Our Father Budget

What Is the Budget of Our Father (2022)?

Our Father (2022), the Netflix true-crime documentary directed by Lucie Jourdan about Indianapolis fertility doctor Donald Cline, was produced on an estimated budget of approximately $1,500,000 to $2,500,000, consistent with the standard Blumhouse Television documentary tariff for a single-film 97-minute investigative documentary in the early 2020s. Netflix acquired global streaming rights from Blumhouse Productions and released the film worldwide on May 11, 2022. Specific budget figures were not publicly disclosed, but the production scope (US-based location shooting in Indianapolis, archive licensing, dozens of interview subjects, and forensic graphics rather than scripted dramatization) aligns with the lower-mid streaming-documentary range.

Blumhouse Productions, the Jason Blum-led horror and genre label that has expanded into documentary across the late 2010s and early 2020s, produced the project alongside Lucie Jourdan's production unit. The economics of streaming-acquired documentary in 2022 were typical of the post-pandemic Netflix true-crime slate: a single-payment all-rights acquisition by Netflix, no theatrical window, and a documentary budget anchored almost entirely in interview-and-archive production design rather than recreations or location-driven storytelling.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Our Father's estimated $1,500,000 to $2,500,000 budget broke down across the cost centers typical of a streaming-documentary investigative feature, with show-specific items reflecting its Indianapolis-based interview structure:

• Interview Subject Production: The film centers on more than 20 interviews with adult children conceived through Cline's fertility fraud (his "siblings", as they describe themselves), their mothers, investigative journalist Angela Ganote, and Indianapolis prosecutors. Travel, location lighting, audio, and on-camera interview setup across the Indianapolis-based subjects and selected out-of-state participants formed the single largest production-cost item.
• Director and Producer Compensation: Lucie Jourdan directed and Jason Blum and Michael Petrella produced. Director and producer compensation for a single-feature streaming documentary at this scale sits within the Producers Guild of America documentary feature norms, with Blumhouse-branded Netflix documentary projects historically delivering at the lower-mid end of the streamer-acquired documentary scale.
• Archive Footage and Legal Clearance: The film uses Indianapolis local-news archive (WTHR Channel 13's ongoing coverage by Angela Ganote), legal-deposition material from the Indiana State Medical Board hearing, family photo archives provided by subjects, and limited dramatized recreation footage. Archive licensing and legal clearance form a recurring cost item across investigative documentary at this scope.
• Indianapolis Location and Crew: Principal photography took place primarily in Indianapolis, Indiana, with selected out-of-state subject interviews. Indiana production costs, local crew rates, and Indianapolis location production made the per-day cost materially lower than a Los Angeles or New York-based equivalent.
• Original Score: Original score by Michael Andrews and music supervision support drove the film's tonal pacing across the slow-build reveal of the scope of the fraud (Cline was eventually identified as the biological father of 94 children conceived through the fraud). The music budget remained modest within the streaming-documentary norm.
• Recreated DNA Test and Forensic Visualization: The film uses graphic overlays to track the expanding cohort of "siblings" identified through commercial DNA testing services. Animated forensic visualization, family-tree graphics, and on-screen DNA result displays drove the post-production graphics line item.
• Post-Production and Delivery: Picture editing, sound design, color grading, and Netflix delivery rounded out the production. The 97-minute runtime, single-narrative structure, and absence of multi-part episodic delivery kept post timeline within the standard Blumhouse Television feature documentary window.

How Does Our Father's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At an estimated $1,500,000 to $2,500,000, Our Father sat in the standard mid-range of streaming-documentary feature economics in the early 2020s, comparable to other Netflix and Blumhouse-branded true-crime documentary acquisitions:

• The Tinder Swindler (2022): Estimated budget approximately $2,000,000 to $3,000,000. Felicity Morris's Netflix Original documentary released in February 2022, three months before Our Father, ran a comparable streaming-documentary feature tariff with similar interview-and-archive production design.
• Bad Vegan (2022): Estimated budget approximately $3,000,000 to $5,000,000 across the four-part Netflix limited documentary series. Chris Smith's March 2022 series ran a higher per-project total because of the multi-episode delivery, although the per-hour cost was comparable to Our Father.
• Three Identical Strangers (2018): Budget approximately $1,500,000 | Worldwide $12,326,397. Tim Wardle's comparable family-secrets investigative documentary, distributed by Neon and CNN Films, ran at a comparable production budget while taking a theatrical-plus-television release that Our Father did not pursue.
• Athlete A (2020): Estimated budget approximately $2,000,000 to $3,000,000. Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk's Netflix documentary on Larry Nassar abuse offers the closest direct comparable for institutional-abuse investigative documentary, with comparable interview-and-archive production design and a similar Netflix-Original release pattern.
• The Family I Had (2017): Estimated budget approximately $500,000 to $1,000,000. Carlye Rubin and Katie Green's comparable Indianapolis-region investigative family documentary, distributed by Reelhouse, ran on a meaningfully smaller budget while addressing comparable subject matter, illustrating the streamer-acquired documentary scale that Our Father represented.

Our Father Box Office and Streaming Performance

Our Father did not receive a theatrical release. Netflix released the film globally on May 11, 2022, with a 97-minute runtime and Blumhouse Television production credit. The film's commercial performance is measured through Netflix's self-reported viewing hours rather than box office figures:

• Production Budget: estimated $1,500,000 to $2,500,000
• Estimated Prints & Advertising (P&A): incorporated into Netflix's global marketing budget; not separately disclosed
• Total Estimated Investment: estimated $1,500,000 to $2,500,000 production plus Netflix acquisition premium
• Theatrical Worldwide Gross: not applicable (Netflix global streaming release)
• Netflix Viewing Hours: 42,600,000 hours globally between May 8 and 29, 2022 (Netflix Top 10 self-reported)
• ROI: positive but not separately quantifiable under Netflix's acquisition-and-streaming economics

Our Father entered Netflix's Top 10 most-viewed films chart in week one and remained in the top 10 across multiple subsequent weeks in the United States and selected international territories. The 42,600,000 viewing hours figure across the first 21 days made the film one of the strongest Netflix documentary launches of the May 2022 release window, comparable to The Tinder Swindler's February 2022 numbers and ahead of the May 2022 release of Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King.

The streaming success drove follow-on press coverage of the Donald Cline case, including additional reporting by Indianapolis local-news outlets (WTHR's Angela Ganote, whose investigative work anchored the film) and national outlets including The Atlantic, NBC News, and CNN. The continuing emergence of additional Cline-conceived "siblings" through commercial DNA services in the months and years after the Netflix release has kept the case in steady public attention.

Our Father Production History

Lucie Jourdan, a French-American documentary director with prior credits in commercial and short-form documentary production, developed Our Father out of years of contact with Indianapolis-area Cline-conceived siblings and journalist Angela Ganote, whose 2014 WTHR Channel 13 reporting first exposed the scope of Donald Cline's fertility fraud. The project entered active production at Blumhouse Television in 2020 and 2021 after Jourdan secured trust-based interview commitments from a critical mass of Cline siblings and their mothers.

Donald Cline, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist who operated the Reproductive Endocrinology Associates fertility clinic from 1979 through 2009, was identified in 2014 through commercial DNA testing as the biological father of multiple adult children whose mothers had received donor-sperm fertility treatment at his clinic. By 2022, more than 90 Cline-conceived siblings had been identified through 23andMe and Ancestry.com matches; by 2024, the figure had grown beyond 100. Cline was charged in 2016 with two counts of obstruction of justice for lying to the Indiana State Medical Board during its investigation, pleaded guilty to a reduced single charge in 2017, and received a one-year suspended sentence and a $500 fine without any direct prosecution for the fertility fraud itself.

Principal photography took place primarily in Indianapolis, Indiana across 2020 and 2021, with Jourdan conducting on-camera interviews in subjects' homes and selected Indianapolis locations. The film centers Jacoba Ballard, the first Cline sibling to identify her biological connection through commercial DNA testing in 2014, as a primary narrator alongside Heather Woock, Julie Manes, and additional siblings whose discoveries cascaded across the years that followed. Angela Ganote's WTHR investigative reporting anchors the journalistic spine of the film.

Editing through 2021 and into early 2022 organized the multi-subject testimony into a single 97-minute investigative narrative. Netflix acquired global rights from Blumhouse in late 2021 or early 2022, with the May 11, 2022 release date set to coincide with the spring true-crime release window. The film's release was accompanied by additional WTHR follow-up reporting in Indianapolis and a wave of national press coverage that kept the Cline case in public attention well into 2023 and 2024.

Awards and Recognition

Our Father received modest awards recognition typical of streaming-acquired investigative documentary. The Critics Choice Documentary Awards shortlisted the film in selected categories, and the True/False, Hot Docs, and SXSW documentary festival circuits engaged with the film through screening, panel, and Q&A formats in the months following the Netflix release.

The film did not receive Academy Award nomination, consistent with the Academy's historical reluctance to nominate streaming-acquired investigative documentary without prior theatrical qualifying runs. The Producers Guild of America documentary awards similarly bypassed the film in favor of larger-scope theatrical-plus-streaming releases of the 2022 documentary slate.

The film's broader impact has been measured through the policy and journalistic conversation it triggered rather than industry awards. Indiana State Representative Donna Schaibley introduced fertility-fraud criminal legislation that passed in 2018, in part in response to the Cline case, and the Netflix release of Our Father in 2022 expanded the policy conversation to additional state legislatures across the United States. Multiple states have since passed fertility-fraud criminal statutes citing the Cline case as motivating precedent.

Critical Reception

Our Father received generally positive reviews, with a 77% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 31 critic reviews. The critical consensus described the film as "shocking, creepy, and at times just plain strange," noting that the documentary works best "when the victims are front and center." Reviewer agreement settled around the film's commitment to centering the Cline siblings' testimony, while a minority of reviews raised tonal concerns about the film's use of horror-adjacent music cues and graphic family-tree visualization.

Variety's Owen Gleiberman called the film "a stunning case study in medical hubris" while flagging the documentary's tendency toward tabloid pacing in selected sequences. The Guardian's Adrian Horton wrote that "the film's strongest moments come when Jacoba Ballard and the other Cline siblings are given space to speak for themselves" while criticizing the recurring use of dramatic recreations of Cline's clinic environment. The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg observed that the film "asks important questions about medical ethics that the conclusion does not fully answer."

Subsequent press coverage has frequently cited Our Father as a representative example of the Netflix true-crime documentary slate of the early 2020s, alongside The Tinder Swindler, Bad Vegan, and Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. The film's policy impact, particularly in driving the expansion of state fertility-fraud criminal legislation, has been recognized in legal-academic and bioethics publications independently of the entertainment-industry awards conversation.