The Space Between Us Budget

What Is the Budget of The Space Between Us?

The Space Between Us was produced on an estimated budget of $30 million. For a mid-budget sci-fi romance released by STXfilms in February 2017, the figure reflects the cost of rendering Martian colony interiors, Earth location photography across New Mexico, and the visual effects needed to sell the premise of a teenager born on Mars visiting Earth for the first time. Writer Allan Loeb and director Peter Chelsom shaped the project as a cross between coming-of-age romance and science fiction, but the budget sat in an uncomfortable middle ground: too expensive for a niche genre exercise, yet too modest to deliver the spectacle audiences expected from a space-set story.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

The $30 million budget covered a production that blended practical New Mexico locations with visual effects work for its Mars sequences.

• Visual Effects and Mars Environments allocated a significant share of the budget to create the East Texas colony on Mars, including interior habitats, exterior Martian landscapes, and the shuttle launch and landing sequences that bookend the story
• Cast Salaries covered a roster led by Asa Butterfield and Britt Robertson in the young leads, with Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino, and BD Wong in supporting roles that lent the film a measure of credibility beyond its teen audience target
• Location and Stage Work funded principal photography in Albuquerque and surrounding New Mexico locations, which doubled for both the Martian colony interiors (shot on stages) and various American landscapes the protagonist encounters on his cross-country road trip
• Production Design covered the construction of the Mars base sets, which needed to look both futuristic and lived-in, as well as the contrast between sterile colony environments and the messy, colorful Earth settings
• Music and Score funded Andrew Lockington's orchestral score, which leaned into sweeping romantic themes to underscore the fish-out-of-water emotional arc
• Post-Production and Editing included color grading to differentiate the warm amber palette of Mars from Earth's blues and greens, plus additional VFX compositing and the extended post schedule caused by the film's multiple release date delays

How Does The Space Between Us's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At $30 million, The Space Between Us occupied the same budgetary tier as other mid-range sci-fi films that leaned on character drama rather than blockbuster action.

• The Martian (2015) had a budget of $108 million and earned $630 million worldwide, demonstrating that Mars-set stories could thrive when backed by an A-list star and a prestige director, a level of commercial insurance The Space Between Us could not match
• Midnight Sun (2018) cost $3.5 million and earned $27 million worldwide, proving that teen romances with a medical/sci-fi hook could succeed on much smaller budgets by keeping scope intimate and marketing costs low
• Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) carried a $177 million budget and earned $225 million worldwide, another 2017 sci-fi misfire that demonstrated how genre ambition without audience connection leads to massive losses
• Passengers (2016) cost $110 million and earned $303 million worldwide, a higher-budget sci-fi romance that also struggled with critics but found enough commercial traction through its star power to approach break-even
• Ender's Game (2013) had a budget of $110 million and earned $125 million worldwide, showing that even established YA sci-fi properties with major stars could underperform when the audience simply does not connect with the material

The Space Between Us Box Office Performance

The Space Between Us opened on February 3, 2017 to a domestic opening weekend of approximately $3.8 million, immediately signaling commercial failure. The film went on to earn $7,885,248 domestically and $14,877,961 worldwide. With a production budget of $30 million, the standard industry break-even threshold (roughly 2x the production budget to account for prints and advertising) would have required approximately $60 million in global theatrical revenue. At under $15 million worldwide, the film recovered less than 25% of its estimated total costs.

The return on investment tells the story plainly: (14.9M - 30M) / 30M x 100 = negative 50.3%. Even factoring in international markets where STXfilms had distribution partners, the theatrical run represented a significant loss. The film faced stiff February competition and suffered from a lack of audience awareness despite multiple marketing pushes tied to its repeated release date shifts. Home video and streaming licensing likely recouped a portion of the deficit, but The Space Between Us stands as one of the clearest box office bombs of early 2017.

• Production Budget: $30,000,000
• Estimated P&A: approximately $21,000,000
• Total Investment: approximately $51,000,000
• Worldwide Gross: $14,793,385
• Net Return: approximately $36,200,000 (loss)
• ROI (on production budget): approximately -51%

The Space Between Us Production History

The project began as a spec script by Allan Loeb that caught the attention of STXfilms, the upstart studio founded in 2014 that was aggressively acquiring mid-budget genre properties. Peter Chelsom, a British director known for character-driven films like Funny Bones and Serendipity, signed on to direct, bringing a sensibility more comfortable with romantic comedy than hard science fiction.

Principal photography took place primarily in and around Albuquerque, New Mexico, taking advantage of the state's film tax incentives and its varied desert landscapes. The New Mexico locations served double duty, standing in for both the Martian surface and the American Southwest that Butterfield's character, Gardner Elliot, traverses during his road trip with Robertson's Tulsa. Studio stages in Albuquerque housed the Mars colony interiors, which production designer Kirk Petruccelli designed as a blend of NASA functionality and lived-in domesticity.

The film's path to release was notably turbulent. Originally slated for a 2016 release, STXfilms pushed the date multiple times, shifting from summer 2016 to December 2016 and finally to February 3, 2017. Each delay carried additional marketing costs and eroded whatever momentum early awareness campaigns had built. The February dump month release date was widely interpreted by industry observers as a signal that the studio had low confidence in the film's commercial prospects. By the time it finally opened, The Space Between Us was competing for teen attention against Split and Hidden Figures, both of which had stronger word-of-mouth.

Awards and Recognition

The Space Between Us received no major awards attention during or after its theatrical run. The film was not nominated for any significant industry awards, visual effects society honors, or teen choice categories. Its critical reception was uniformly poor, and the box office performance ensured it did not generate the kind of audience following that sometimes leads to belated recognition for underperforming genre films. The sole area where the film maintained a modest presence was in home video and streaming recommendations, where its teen romance hook kept it circulating among younger viewers who discovered it after its theatrical window closed.

Critical Reception

The Space Between Us holds a 17% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making it one of the worst-reviewed wide releases of 2017. Critics were particularly harsh on the screenplay, which they found overly sentimental and riddled with scientific implausibilities that the film made no effort to address. The tonal mismatch between Chelsom's gentle romantic sensibility and the sci-fi premise struck most reviewers as irreconcilable.

Asa Butterfield's performance drew mixed responses. Some critics noted his natural charm and commitment to the role of a Martian-born teenager experiencing rain, horses, and human touch for the first time, while others found the character's wide-eyed wonder grating across a full runtime. Britt Robertson's Tulsa was seen as underwritten, and Gary Oldman's performance as the NASA director was described by several reviewers as oddly pitched, alternating between restrained and overwrought without clear motivation.

The consensus among critics was that The Space Between Us had a potentially compelling core idea, a first human born on another planet visiting Earth, but failed to develop it with the intelligence or emotional specificity the premise demanded. Comparisons to better-executed fish-out-of-water stories like Starman and E.T. only underlined how far the film fell short of its ambitions.