The Sting

Production Budget Analysis

What was the production budget for The Sting?

Directed by George Roy Hill, with Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw leading the cast, The Sting was produced by Universal Pictures with a confirmed budget of $5,500,000, placing it in the micro-budget category for comedy films as part of the The Sting Collection.

At $5,500,000, The Sting was produced on a modest budget. Lower-budget films benefit from reduced break-even thresholds, with profitability achievable at approximately $13,750,000.

Budget Comparison — Similar Productions

• Show Dogs (2018): Budget $5,500,000 | Gross $38,830,219 → ROI: 606% • 47 Meters Down (2017): Budget $5,500,000 | Gross $62,198,461 → ROI: 1031% • Akira (1988): Budget $5,700,000 | Gross $49,000,000 → ROI: 760% • Metropolis (1927): Budget $5,300,000 | Gross $1,350,322 → ROI: -75% • Riders of Justice (2020): Budget $5,300,000 | Gross $679,505 → ROI: -87%

Key Budget Allocation Categories

▸ Talent Salaries & Producing Deals Established comedic talent can command $15–20 million per film, with top-tier stars earning even more through producing credits and backend deals. Comedy ensembles multiply this cost across several well-known performers.

▸ Production & Location Filming While comedies generally avoid the VFX costs of action films, location shooting in recognizable cities or exotic locales adds meaningful production expense.

▸ Marketing & P&A (Prints & Advertising) Comedies rely heavily on marketing to build opening-weekend momentum. Studios typically spend 50–100% of the production budget on marketing, with comedy trailers and social media campaigns being particularly expensive.

Key Production Personnel

CAST: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, Charles Durning, Ray Walston Key roles: Paul Newman as Henry Gondorff; Robert Redford as Johnny Hooker; Robert Shaw as Doyle Lonnegan; Charles Durning as Lt. Wm. Snyder

DIRECTOR: George Roy Hill CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Surtees MUSIC: Marvin Hamlisch, Scott Joplin EDITING: William Reynolds PRODUCTION: Universal Pictures, The Zanuck/Brown Company, David Brown Productions FILMED IN: United States of America

Box Office Performance

The Sting earned $156,000,000 domestically and $3,616,327 internationally, for a worldwide total of $159,616,327. The film skewed heavily domestic (98%), suggesting strong North American appeal.

Break-Even Analysis

Using the industry-standard 2.5x multiplier (P&A + exhibitor shares of 40–50% + distribution fees), The Sting needed approximately $13,750,000 to break even. The film surpassed this threshold by $145,866,327.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Revenue: $159,616,327 Budget: $5,500,000 Net: $154,116,327 ROI: 2802.1%

Detailed Box Office Notes

The film was a box-office smash in 1973 and early 1974, grossing $156 million in the United States and Canada. it was the 20th highest-grossing film in the United States adjusted for ticket price inflation. Internationally, it grossed $101 million for a worldwide gross of $257 million.

Profitability Assessment

VERDICT: Highly Profitable

The Sting was a clear financial success, generating $159,616,327 worldwide against a $5,500,000 production budget — a 2802% ROI. After estimated marketing costs, the film still delivered substantial profit to Universal Pictures.

INDUSTRY IMPACT

Franchise: The Sting is part of the The Sting Collection.

The outsized success of The Sting likely influenced studio greenlight decisions for similar comedy projects.

PRODUCTION NOTES

▸ Writing

Screenwriter David S. Ward has said in an interview that he was inspired to write The Sting while researching pickpockets: "Since I had never seen a film about a confidence man before, I said I gotta do this." Daniel Eagan said: "One key to plots about con men is that film goers want to feel they are in on the trick. They don't have to know how a scheme works, and they don't mind a twist or two, but it's important for the story to feature clearly recognizable 'good' and 'bad' characters." It took Ward a year to fine-tune this aspect of the script and to determine how much information he could withhold from the audience while still making the leads sympathetic. He also imagined an underground brotherhood of thieves who assemble for a big operation and then melt away afterward.

Years later, director Rob Cohen recounted how he found the script in the slush pile when working as a reader for Mike Medavoy, a future studio head, but then an agent. He wrote in his coverage that it was "the great American screenplay and … will make an award-winning, major-cast, major-director film." Medavoy said that he would try to sell it on that recommendation, promising to fire Cohen if he could not. Universal bought it that afternoon, and Cohen keeps the coverage framed on the wall of his office.

Academic David Maurer sued for plagiarism, claiming the screenplay was based too heavily on his 1940 book The Big Con, about real-life tricksters Fred and Charley Gondorff. Universal settled out of court for $600,000, irking Ward, who resented the presumption of guilt implied by an out-of-court settlement done for business expediency.

Writer/producer Roy Huggins maintained in his Archive of American Television interview that the first half of The Sting plagiarized the 1958 Maverick television series episode "Shady Deal at Sunny Acres", starring James Garner and Jack Kelly.

▸ Casting

Jack Nicholson was offered the lead role but declined it. He later said "I had enough business acumen to know The Sting was going to be a huge hit, [but] at the same time Chinatown and The Last Detail were more interesting films to me."

Newman signed on to the film after the producers agreed to give him top billing, $500,000, and a percentage of the profits. His previous five films had been box-office disappointments.

In her 1991 autobiography You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, producer Julia Phillips writes that Hill wanted Richard Boone to play Lonnegan. Much to her relief, Newman had sent the script to Robert Shaw while shooting The Mackintosh Man in Ireland to ensure his participation in the film. Phillips' book asserts that Shaw was not nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor because he demanded that his name follow those of Newman and Redford before the film's opening title.

Shaw's character's limp in the film was authentic. Shaw had injured his leg while playing handball shortly before filming began. Director Hill encouraged him to incorporate the limp into his character rather than withdraw from the project.

▸ Filming & Locations

Hill wanted the film to be reminiscent of movies from the 1930s and drew inspiration from films of that decade. He noticed that most '30s gangster films had no extras. "For instance", Andrew Horton's book The Films of George Roy Hill quotes Hill as saying, "no extras would be used in street scenes in those films: Jimmy Cagney would be shot down and die in an empty street. So I deliberately avoided using extras."

Along with art director Henry Bumstead and cinematographer Robert L. Surtees, Hill devised a color scheme of muted browns and maroons for the film and a lighting design that combined old-fashioned 1930s-style lighting with some modern tricks of the trade to get the visual look he wanted. Edith Head designed a wardrobe of snappy period costumes for the cast, and artist Jaroslav Gebr created inter-title cards to be used to introduce each section of the film that were reminiscent of the golden glow of old Saturday Evening Post illustrations, a popular publication of the 1930s.

The movie was filmed on the Universal Studios backlot, with a few small scenes shot in Wheeling, West Virginia, some scenes filmed at the Santa Monica pier's carousel, in Southern California, and in Chicago at Union Station and the former LaSalle Street Station. An antique car buff, co-producer Tony Bill helped round up several period cars to use in The Sting. One of them was his own 1935 Pierce-Arrow limousine, which served as Lonnegan's private car.

▸ Music & Score

The soundtrack album, executive produced by Gil Rodin, includes several of Scott Joplin's ragtime compositions, adapted by Marvin Hamlisch.

According to Joplin scholar Edward A. Berlin, ragtime experienced a revival in the 1970s due to several events: a best-selling recording of Joplin rags on the classical Nonesuch Records label, along with a collection of his music issued by the New York Public Library; the first full staging of Joplin's opera Treemonisha; and a performance of period orchestrations of Joplin's music by a student ensemble of the New England Conservatory of Music, led by Gunther Schuller. "Inspired by Schuller's recording, [Hill] had Marvin Hamlisch score Joplin's music for the film, thereby bringing Joplin to a mass, popular public."

AWARDS & RECOGNITION

Summary: Won 7 Oscars. 18 wins & 6 nominations total

Awards Won: ★ Academy Award for Best Costume Design — Edith Head (46th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay — David S. Ward (46th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Picture — Tony Bill (46th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Picture — Julia Phillips (46th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Picture — Michael Phillips (46th Academy Awards) ★ National Board of Review Award for Best Film ★ Academy Award for Best Director — George Roy Hill (46th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Production Design — Henry Bumstead (46th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Production Design — James W. Payne (46th Academy Awards) ★ National Board of Review: Top Ten Films ★ Academy Award for Best Film Editing — William H. Reynolds (46th Academy Awards) ★ Academy Award for Best Original Song Score — Marvin Hamlisch (46th Academy Awards)

Nominations: ○ Academy Award for Best Director (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Original Song Score (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Actor (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Cinematography (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Film Editing (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Picture (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Costume Design (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Sound (46th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Production Design (46th Academy Awards)

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and called it "one of the most stylish movies of the year". Gene Siskel awarded three-and-a-half stars out of four, calling it "a movie movie that has obviously been made with loving care each and every step of the way." Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that the film was "so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it's up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Variety wrote, "George Roy Hill's outstanding direction of David S. Ward's finely-crafted story of multiple deception and surprise ending will delight both mass and class audiences. Extremely handsome production values and a great supporting cast round out the virtues." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it "an unalloyed delight, the kind of pure entertainment film that's all the more welcome for having become such a rarity." John Simon wrote that The Sting as a comedy-thriller "works endearingly without a hitch".

Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was less enthusiastic, writing that the film "is meant to be roguishly charming entertainment, and that's how most of the audience takes it, but I found it visually claustrophobic, and totally mechanical. It keeps cranking on, section after section, and it doesn't have a good spirit."

In 2005, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2006, the Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay #39 on its list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written. On Rotten Tomatoes, The Sting holds a rating of 92% from 101 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10.