Uncorked Budget

What Is the Budget of Uncorked (2020)?

Uncorked is a 2020 American family drama written and directed by Prentice Penny in his feature directorial debut. The film was financed by Mandalay Pictures, Argent Pictures, Datari Turner Productions, and Penny's A Penny For Your Thoughts Entertainment, and acquired by Netflix as a streaming original ahead of its March 27, 2020 global premiere. No formal production budget figure has been publicly disclosed by the producers or by trade press.

Comparable mid-budget American independent dramas of similar scale, Memphis and Paris location footprints, and a 104-minute runtime typically operate in the $3,000,000 to $6,000,000 range. The film recouped through its Netflix acquisition fee rather than through theatrical receipts.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Uncorked's production budget was distributed across several core cost categories:

• Above-the-Line Talent: Director Prentice Penny, the showrunner of HBO's Insecure, made his feature directorial debut with this project. The cast is anchored by Mamoudou Athie (The Get Down, Jurassic World: Dominion), Courtney B. Vance (The People v. O.J. Simpson), Niecy Nash, and Matt McGorry, with each commanding fees consistent with mid-budget independent feature norms.
• Memphis Location Shoot: The film opens and centers on the Memphis barbecue restaurant Mutual Smoke House, with extensive location work across the city including the Beale Street area, downtown Memphis, and family residential neighborhoods. The Memphis shoot benefited from Tennessee production incentives.
• Paris Master Sommelier Sequence: The third-act Paris master sommelier examination sequence required international location work in France, with the production traveling to Paris for exterior coverage, cafe and bistro material, and the formal examination setting.
• Wine and Food Production Design: The film's central subject required extensive on-screen wine handling, glassware, bottle dressing, and food preparation. The barbecue restaurant scenes demanded continuous practical food preparation, and the wine sommelier scenes required wine consultants, blind tasting setups, and continuity tracking across multiple service scenes.
• Original Score: Hit-Boy, the GRAMMY-winning hip-hop producer best known for production on Jay-Z's Niggas in Paris and Travis Scott's Sicko Mode, scored the film, blending contemporary hip-hop and soul instrumentation with traditional dramatic underscore.
• Sundance Premiere and Festival Run: The film world-premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival's 2020 program (which was ultimately canceled by the pandemic) and at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles before its Netflix global release. Festival submission, travel, and marketing absorbed a portion of the post-production budget.

How Does Uncorked's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

Uncorked operates within a tradition of Black American family dramas built around culinary and craft professions. Useful reference points include:

• Soul Food (1997): Budget $7,500,000 | Worldwide $43,481,694. George Tillman Jr.'s Black family-and-food drama sets the commercial reference point that Uncorked engages with thematically.
• Burnt (2015): Budget $20,000,000 | Worldwide $36,633,777. The high end of culinary-ambition drama, illustrating the budget ceiling for theatrical chef and sommelier narratives.
• Sideways (2004): Budget $16,000,000 | Worldwide $109,706,931. Alexander Payne's wine country drama is the canonical reference for wine-centered cinema and a measure of how broadly the subject can travel.
• The Photograph (2020): Budget $16,000,000 | Worldwide $20,775,200. Stella Meghie's Black romantic drama from the same release window provides a closely comparable streaming-era profile.
• Roxanne Roxanne (2017): Budget undisclosed | Netflix streaming. Michael Larnell's Netflix-released hip-hop biopic, also produced by Mandalay Pictures, gives a direct precedent for the Mandalay Netflix release model.

Uncorked Box Office Performance

Uncorked premiered exclusively on Netflix on March 27, 2020, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, and did not receive a theatrical release in any market. Netflix does not publish revenue or viewership data for its original films at title-level granularity, and no theatrical box office figures exist.

Against an estimated production budget in the low single-digit millions of dollars, the financial breakdown is as follows:

• Production Budget: estimated at approximately $3,000,000 to $6,000,000 (not officially disclosed)
• Estimated Prints & Advertising (P&A): modest, Netflix platform marketing only
• Total Estimated Investment: approximately $3,500,000 to $7,000,000 (estimated)
• Worldwide Gross: not applicable (streaming exclusive)
• Net Return: measured by Netflix as subscriber engagement, not theatrical revenue
• ROI: not calculable in theatrical terms

The economic case for Uncorked is structured around the Netflix acquisition fee paid to Mandalay Pictures and the production partners, with downstream value built into Netflix's catalog rather than theatrical receipts. The March 2020 release window during the early pandemic lockdown gave the film an outsized share of viewer attention, and Penny's profile from Insecure helped drive subscriber engagement.

Uncorked Production History

Prentice Penny developed Uncorked over several years while serving as showrunner of HBO's Insecure, drawing on his own background as a wine enthusiast and on the broader cultural project of expanding the demographic profile of master sommelier candidates. Only a handful of Black professionals have held the title across the master sommelier program's history, and the film grew out of Penny's interest in dramatizing the path that those candidates take through the examination.

Principal photography took place in Memphis, with extensive location work across the city's barbecue restaurant scene, residential neighborhoods, and Beale Street area. The shoot benefited from Tennessee production incentives. A subsequent Paris production block covered the master sommelier examination third act, with exterior cafe and bistro coverage across the city.

Mandalay Pictures co-financed the production with Argent Pictures, Datari Turner Productions, and Penny's company A Penny For Your Thoughts Entertainment, with Netflix acquiring global streaming rights ahead of completion. The film was set for premieres at the 2020 South by Southwest Film Festival and the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles before the pandemic forced changes; it ultimately launched directly to Netflix on March 27, 2020.

Awards and Recognition

Uncorked received modest awards recognition. Mamoudou Athie was nominated for the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award alongside the ensemble of the film, and Prentice Penny received recognition from the African American Film Critics Association for breakthrough directorial work. The film received Image Award nominations from the NAACP.

The major industry ceremonies, including the Independent Spirit Awards core categories, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Sundance prizes, did not extend nominations to Uncorked, reflecting both the limited theatrical profile of pandemic-era Netflix releases and the crowded 2020 awards landscape. The film has nonetheless been recognized as a meaningful debut for Penny within the Black American film community.

Critical Reception

Uncorked received broadly positive reviews. The film holds a 91 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 46 critic reviews with an average rating of 6.9 out of 10. On Metacritic, the film scored 62 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating generally favorable reviews. CinemaScore does not survey direct-to-streaming releases.

Critics praised Prentice Penny's tonal balance between family drama and culinary ambition, Mamoudou Athie's lead performance, and Courtney B. Vance's grounded work as Elijah's father. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the film offered "heartfelt tenderness paired with a confident grasp of culinary subculture," and IndieWire praised Penny's "sure-footed direction in his feature debut." Several wine and food critics offered more reserved coverage, raising questions about the granularity of the master sommelier examination depiction.

Audience response on Letterboxd and Netflix audience surveys has been broadly favorable, and the film has held sustained catalog position within Netflix's Black-creator-led drama collection. The film is now widely cited in conversations about food-and-craft drama and as an early example of Penny's directorial voice ahead of his subsequent feature work.