The Burning Plain Budget

What Is the Budget of The Burning Plain (2009)?

The Burning Plain (2009), directed by Guillermo Arriaga and distributed by Magnolia Pictures, was produced on a reported budget of $20,000,000. The drama was financed by 2929 Productions, Costa Films, and Mod Producciones, with Arriaga, the screenwriter behind Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, making his directorial debut after a public split from Alejandro González Iñárritu. Producers Walter F. Parkes, Laurie MacDonald, Rachel Horovitz, and Andrew Z. Davis structured the production as a multi-strand prestige drama positioned for festival circuit and limited theatrical release.

The investment was a calculated arthouse-prestige play. 2929 Productions, the Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner outfit, wanted a property that could anchor its festival pipeline and demonstrate that Arriaga's fractured-timeline screenwriting style could be successfully translated by the writer himself behind the camera. The math required only modest worldwide gross to clear breakeven given the limited release strategy, but the film never broke out commercially beyond a small festival audience.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

The Burning Plain's $20,000,000 budget was distributed across several core production areas:

• Above-the-Line Talent: Guillermo Arriaga commanded both writer and first-time-director fees from the project. Charlize Theron, fresh off Hancock and her ongoing prestige run, signed at a reduced rate for the indie scale, with Kim Basinger taking a supporting role at a comparable indie fee. Jennifer Lawrence in a breakthrough role and Joaquim de Almeida, José María Yazpik, and John Corbett rounded out the cast at working rates. The combined above-the-line cost was substantial relative to the budget.
• Multiple Location Shoots: Principal photography took place across three primary location blocks: Portland, Oregon for the contemporary thread; Las Cruces, New Mexico for the historical thread; and additional unit work in Tijuana, Mexico. Each location block required full unit reset, lodging, and local crew, adding significant cost compared with a single-site production.
• Production Design: Production designer Dan Leigh constructed period-specific interiors for the New Mexico thread, including the burned trailer and family home, and contemporary restaurant and apartment sets for the Portland thread. Department spend was substantial relative to a typical indie drama because of the dual-period structure.
• Cinematography and Camera: Director of photography Robert Elswit, fresh off his Academy Award for There Will Be Blood, anchored the production at a premium DP rate. His naturalistic landscape work in New Mexico and Oregon was central to the film's visual identity and consumed substantial scheduling time.
• Score and Music: Composers Hans Zimmer and Omar Rodríguez-López scored the film with an experimental ambient and texture-based score. The double-composer approach added cost compared with a single-composer engagement but contributed to the film's festival positioning.
• Editing and Post-Production: Editor Craig Wood worked extensively to construct the film's fractured timeline, with multiple revisions through 2008 leading to the final cut's 107-minute runtime. The complex editorial structure required extended post-production scheduling.

How Does The Burning Plain's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At $20,000,000, The Burning Plain sat in the upper-middle range of late-2000s prestige dramas:

• Babel (2006): Budget $25,000,000 | Worldwide $135,330,840. Arriaga's previous screenplay-collaboration with Iñárritu cost 25% more and earned more than 17x what The Burning Plain grossed, demonstrating the commercial gap between Arriaga's name attached as writer and as director.
• 21 Grams (2003): Budget $20,000,000 | Worldwide $60,403,000. The earlier Arriaga and Iñárritu collaboration cost the same as The Burning Plain and earned roughly 12x its worldwide gross, the most direct apples-to-apples comparable.
• North Country (2005): Budget $35,000,000 | Worldwide $25,229,067. Charlize Theron's prior labor-drama lead role cost 75% more and earned somewhat more than The Burning Plain, a comparison illustrating Theron's indie-vehicle commercial ceiling.
• Things We Lost in the Fire (2007): Budget $16,000,000 | Worldwide $8,718,344. The DreamWorks-distributed prestige grief drama cost 20% less than The Burning Plain and earned roughly 70% of its worldwide gross, the close comparable for the prestige-grief subgenre.
• Rachel Getting Married (2008): Budget $12,000,000 | Worldwide $16,338,025. Jonathan Demme's contemporary prestige drama cost 60% of The Burning Plain and earned more than 3x its worldwide gross, the festival-to-arthouse comparable that out-performed.

The Burning Plain Box Office Performance

The Burning Plain premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival on September 6, 2008 and received limited theatrical distribution beginning in late 2008 in international territories and on September 18, 2009 in the United States. The American release was confined to a maximum of 22 theaters and never expanded beyond a platform run, generating a domestic theatrical gross of just $202,221.

Against a $20,000,000 production budget the film needed only modest international and ancillary revenue to clear breakeven after marketing. Here is the financial breakdown:

• Production Budget: $20,000,000
• Estimated Prints & Advertising (P&A): approximately $3,000,000 to $5,000,000
• Total Estimated Investment: approximately $23,000,000 to $25,000,000
• Worldwide Gross: $5,206,879
• Net Return: approximately $19,793,121 loss (against total estimated investment)
• ROI: approximately negative 79% (against total estimated investment)

The Burning Plain returned approximately $0.21 in theatrical revenue for every $1 invested when measured against total estimated production and marketing spend, a substantial commercial loss even for a prestige festival drama. The domestic share of the gross was $202,221 against an international share of $5,004,658, a 4/96 split heavily weighted toward international markets that responded to Arriaga's name attachment more strongly than the United States.

Home video provided modest recovery. The Magnolia Pictures home entertainment release and subsequent international VOD plays returned the film to a steady catalog presence, though it remains one of 2929 Productions' most decisive commercial misses.

The Burning Plain Production History

Development on The Burning Plain began in 2006 immediately after Guillermo Arriaga's public split with Alejandro González Iñárritu during the press tour for Babel. Arriaga had written the screenplay and decided to direct the project himself after years of conflict with Iñárritu over the relative billing and credit of writer versus director. 2929 Productions, the Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner outfit known for backing experimental prestige work, financed the project in partnership with Costa Films and Mod Producciones.

Charlize Theron was cast as Sylvia in early 2007, with Kim Basinger signed as Gina, Joaquim de Almeida as Nick, and José María Yazpik as Santiago. Jennifer Lawrence was cast as the teenage Mariana in what became one of her first significant theatrical roles, predating Winter's Bone by two years. Producer Walter F. Parkes had previously worked with Theron on The Italian Job and brought her in early to anchor the project.

Principal photography ran from June through September 2007 across Portland, Oregon for the contemporary thread, Las Cruces, New Mexico for the historical thread, and Tijuana, Mexico for additional unit work. Cinematographer Robert Elswit, fresh off his Academy Award for There Will Be Blood, anchored the photography. Hans Zimmer and Omar Rodríguez-López composed the score during post-production in 2008. The film premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival in competition.

Awards and Recognition

The Burning Plain received modest festival recognition. The film competed for the Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, where Jennifer Lawrence won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress for her performance as the teenage Mariana, an early honor that contributed to her subsequent breakout in Winter's Bone.

The film was also nominated at the 2009 Goya Awards (Spain's national awards) in technical categories and received scattered international recognition. The Lawrence win at Venice has been the film's lasting legacy in awards conversation, with the actress's subsequent career making her early appearance here a frequently revisited credit.

Critical Reception

The Burning Plain received mixed reviews. The film holds a 51% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 75 critic reviews, with a critical consensus calling it a familiar exercise in Arriaga's fractured-timeline trademark that struggles to justify its emotional weight. On Metacritic, the film scored 53 out of 100, indicating mixed or average reviews. The film did not register a CinemaScore due to its limited theatrical release.

Critics broadly praised Robert Elswit's cinematography, Jennifer Lawrence's precocious performance, and Arriaga's confidence behind the camera, but objected to the schematic nature of the screenplay and what Roger Ebert called "a film that takes a great deal of skill to set up a connection we can see coming from the first scene." A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that the film "feels like Arriaga in his comfort zone, which is also his cage." Variety's Todd McCarthy called it "an emotionally airless construction more interested in its structure than in its people."

The film generated additional press because of the Arriaga and Iñárritu split. Critics frequently compared the directorial output of the two collaborators, with the consensus that Iñárritu had retained the visual signature of their joint work while Arriaga had retained the screenplay-structural mechanics. The Burning Plain has remained a curiosity in Arriaga's subsequent directorial work, which has skewed toward shorter and television projects rather than theatrical features.