Red Notice Budget

What Is the Budget of Red Notice?

Red Notice (2021) had a reported production budget of $200,000,000, the figure Deadline Hollywood attached to the film when it opened and the one most widely cited since. Written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber and starring Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, it was the most expensive film Netflix had ever made, and it held that title until The Gray Man (2022) took it the following year.

You will also see $160,000,000 quoted for this film, including on movie databases. That number comes from July 2019, when Variety reported the stars' Netflix paydays and quoted one insider who put the budget at roughly $160,000,000. The same sentence of the same report said the budget could reach $200,000,000 once additional fees were counted, and those fees were real: Netflix bought out the back-end profit participation the stars would have earned on a theatrical release, and it customarily pays extra to finish and deliver the films it acquires. The two numbers describe the same film with and without those payments, before a pandemic shutdown added more.

The cost rose at every stage of the film's life. When Universal and Legendary won the auction for the project in February 2018, Deadline reported it would cost upwards of $125,000,000. By the November 2021 release, Deadline was describing a $200,000,000 film, and The Hollywood Reporter went further, writing that its price tag was said to be well north of $250,000,000 and possibly close to $300,000,000. Thurber did not confirm any figure in that interview and Netflix has never published one, so this page uses $200,000,000: the figure Deadline reported at release, and the level Variety said in 2019 the budget could reach once fees were counted.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Netflix has not released a line-item budget, but the reporting on the deal and the shoot shows clearly where the money went:

• Above-the-Line Talent: Variety reported that the three stars negotiated pay parity when the film moved to Netflix: Reynolds at $20,000,000, Gadot at the same level once the streamer bought out her back end, and Johnson at millions of dollars more as a lead producer. Thurber was set to earn at least $10,000,000 to write, direct and produce. That is more than $70,000,000 committed to four people before a frame was shot. Thurber told The Hollywood Reporter that "the above-the-line number is very, very high," adding that where a Mission: Impossible film has one Tom Cruise, "We've got three Tom Cruises in this movie."
• Locations in Atlanta and Italy: Principal photography was based in Atlanta, Georgia, for a story that moves between Rome, Bali, Russia, Valencia, Argentina and Cairo. The production closed with a week of shooting in Rome and Sardinia, Italy, in November 2020.
• The COVID-19 Shutdown and Restart: Production began in January 2020 and was halted on March 14, 2020, with the crew laid off under force majeure. When it resumed on September 14, 2020, the production had to restart a stalled shoot from scratch and rebuild its schedule around testing and limits on crowd sizes.
• Visual Effects: Thurber told The Hollywood Reporter the film began with about 400 visual effects shots and finished with around 1,500. Scenes designed for crowds, such as a masquerade ball planned with 300 extras, had to be shot in layers and composited, with the actors wearing N95 masks under their masquerade masks. "That is why the budget went up," he said. Richard R. Hoover served as overall visual effects supervisor.
• Stunts and Camera Work: The chases, fights and vault heists were staged at theatrical tentpole scale, and Red Notice was one of the first features to rely heavily on first-person-view drone cinematography, with FPV pilot Johnny Schaer flying the camera through the action.

How Does Red Notice's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At $200,000,000, Red Notice sits in the top tier of live-action budgets, level with the theatrical tentpoles its three stars made in the same years. The difference is how the money was meant to come back: those films had to earn it at the box office, while Netflix paid for its subscribers' attention.

• Jungle Cruise (2021): Budget $200,000,000 | Worldwide $220,889,446. Johnson's other 2021 tentpole cost exactly what Red Notice did, but Disney released it in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access on the same day, and its worldwide gross landed only slightly above its budget.
• Wonder Woman 1984 (2020): Budget $200,000,000 | Worldwide $169,601,036. Gadot's own $200,000,000 film of the period streamed on HBO Max in the US on its opening day and grossed less than its budget worldwide, a sign of how rarely pandemic-era hybrid releases recovered tentpole costs in theaters.
• Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019): Budget $200,000,000 | Worldwide $760,732,926. A Johnson action vehicle at the same budget, released two years earlier, shows what $200,000,000 could return with a full theatrical run behind it.
• Skyscraper (2018): Budget $125,000,000 | Worldwide $304,870,828. Thurber and Johnson's previous film was made with Universal and Legendary, the same partners who first bought Red Notice, and the new project started out at a similar cost before the move to Netflix and the pandemic pushed it higher.
• Central Intelligence (2016): Budget $50,000,000 | Worldwide $216,940,871. The first Thurber and Johnson collaboration cost a quarter of Red Notice, which measures how far the pair's budgets climbed in five years.

Among Netflix originals, Red Notice reset the ceiling. Before it, the streamer's biggest live-action bets included Bright (2017) at a reported $90,000,000, Triple Frontier (2019) at $115,000,000, Michael Bay's 6 Underground (2019), also starring Reynolds, at $150,000,000, and The Irishman (2019), most often reported at $159,000,000.

Red Notice Box Office Performance

Red Notice has no official box office gross. Netflix does not report ticket sales, and the film played only a one-week exclusive theatrical run before it streamed: it opened in about 750 US theaters on November 5, 2021 and arrived on Netflix worldwide on November 12. Deadline estimated the opening weekend at $1,250,000 to $1,500,000 from those 750 locations, reported a week later that the domestic running total was well above $2,000,000, and noted that distribution sources put the film's ceiling at about $3,000,000 even if every seat had sold.

Some databases list a worldwide gross of $178,143. That is a single-territory figure: Box Office Mojo's only record for the film is its release in Portugal on November 4, 2021, so it is not a worldwide total and is not used here.

Netflix judged the film by viewing instead, and on that measure it was the biggest film the service had released. It logged 148.72 million hours in its debut weekend, then the highest opening for any Netflix film, and 364.02 million hours in its first 28 days. Within eleven days it passed Bird Box (2018) as Netflix's most-watched film ever, a record it held until KPop Demon Hunters (2025) overtook it in August 2025. Samba TV counted 4.2 million US households watching in the first three days.

No return per dollar can be calculated for Red Notice. Netflix has not disclosed its theatrical gross, its marketing spend or any revenue attributable to the film, so the $200,000,000 budget has no published figure to be measured against.

Red Notice Production History

Red Notice began as one of the most fought-over pitches of 2018. Thurber wrote out his entire pitch over 28 pages, took it to 11 buyers and received 11 offers, and on February 9, 2018 Universal Pictures and Legendary won the auction. Deadline reported that the deal gave Johnson a $20,000,000 payday against breakeven gross and Thurber an eight-figure fee to write and direct. The film was produced by Beau Flynn through Flynn Picture Company, by Johnson, Dany Garcia and Hiram Garcia through Seven Bucks Productions, and by Thurber through Bad Version. Gal Gadot joined in June 2018, and Universal dated the film for June 12, 2020, then moved it to November 13, 2020.

The project changed hands before a frame was shot. In July 2019 Universal let the filmmakers shop the film to other studios, and Netflix took it on July 8, 2019, with Paramount also bidding and Ryan Reynolds joining the cast at the same time. Johnson thanked Netflix publicly for "making its largest commitment ever to a feature film." A start date planned for April 2019, after Johnson finished Jumanji: The Next Level (2019), slipped to early 2020.

Principal photography began on January 3, 2020 in Atlanta, with Ritu Arya and Chris Diamantopoulos joining the cast in February. On March 14, 2020 the pandemic shut production down indefinitely, and a location shoot planned for Italy was cancelled. "Everyone was laid off, it was force majeure," Thurber told The Hollywood Reporter. "I didn't know if we were coming back."

Filming resumed on September 14, 2020 under COVID-19 protocols that forced the crowd scenes to be rebuilt in visual effects. Reynolds and Gadot completed their scenes by the end of October, work in Atlanta wrapped on November 14, 2020, and the production finished with a week in Rome and Sardinia that ended on November 18. Steve Jablonsky, who had scored Skyscraper for Thurber, composed the music. The film was finished late enough that pick-up shots were still needed, which Deadline reported as the reason it received only a one-week theatrical window rather than the three weeks Netflix gave its awards titles.

Netflix moved quickly on a franchise. In January 2022 reports said the streamer was developing two sequels to be shot back to back, with Thurber, Johnson, Reynolds and Gadot expected to return, and the script for the second film was reported finished in October 2022.

Awards and Recognition

Red Notice was never an awards contender, and its recognition came from trailer, audience-voted and regional critics' honors rather than the guilds or the Oscars. Its "Teamwork" trailer, cut by JAX for Netflix, was nominated for Best Action at the 2022 Golden Trailer Awards against The Batman, Bullet Train, The Matrix Resurrections and Top Gun: Maverick (2022), which won the category.

At the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards in April 2022, Dwayne Johnson was nominated for Favorite Movie Actor for Red Notice and Jungle Cruise, and Ryan Reynolds was nominated in the same category for Red Notice and Free Guy (2021); Tom Holland won for Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). Thurber was also nominated for the Oglethorpe Award for Excellence in Georgia Cinema from the Georgia Film Critics Association, which recognizes films made in the state.

The film's most durable distinction is commercial rather than critical: for nearly four years it was the most-watched film in Netflix's history.

Critical Reception

Critics were unimpressed. On Rotten Tomatoes, 36% of 174 reviews are positive, and the site's consensus reads: "Red Notice's big budget and A-list cast add up to a slickly competent action comedy whose gaudy ingredients only make the middling results more head-scratching." Metacritic gives it 37 out of 100 from 38 critics, indicating generally unfavorable reviews. Audiences were far kinder: the Rotten Tomatoes audience score stands at 92%.

The positive notices praised the package. Peter Debruge of Variety called it "a fun, fast-paced and frequently amusing divertissement" that is "reasonably clever, so long as you don't scrutinize it too closely," likening it to National Treasure (2004). David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that "you can't argue with the muscular marquee value of headlining Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot in a slick, fast-paced action thriller laced with playful comedy, even if it's an empty-calorie entertainment like Red Notice."

The negative reviews went after the same package. Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times called the film "a depressing reminder of what Hollywood considers 'original' material these days" and concluded, "By the end, it's the clichés that warrant a rest." The split is the film's story in miniature: the budget that the Rotten Tomatoes consensus singled out bought exactly what Netflix wanted, a star package that drew record viewing regardless of the reviews.