The Revenant Budget

What Is the Budget of The Revenant?

The Revenant (2015), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, had a production budget of $135,000,000, the figure Box Office Mojo and The Numbers both list. TheWrap reported in October 2015 that $135,000,000 was the estimated final cost once tax credits were counted, so it is a net figure; TheWrap's sources put the cost before incentives at around $165,000,000.

The number is well known because of how far it moved. New Regency, Arnon Milchan's company, originally envisioned a $60,000,000 film based on the involvement of Iñárritu and DiCaprio, according to TheWrap, and by the time cameras rolled the budget was pegged at $95,000,000. In July 2015 The Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters reported that spending had climbed well past $95,000,000 and that insiders expected it to reach or exceed $135,000,000, and in October TheWrap put the final bill at about that level. Deadline later summed it up as a budget that started at $60,000,000, ballooned to $95,000,000 and topped out at $135,000,000.

Who paid the difference mattered. 20th Century Fox distributed the film but did not finance it, according to TheWrap. New Regency covered the majority of the budget and had to absorb most of the overages, because budget caps protected its partners. Brett Ratner's RatPac put up about a quarter of the original budget and shared some of the overages, according to The Hollywood Reporter, while China's Alpha Pictures and Empyre, a fund based in Abu Dhabi and Brazil, held smaller pieces.

Key Budget Allocation Categories

Neither New Regency nor Fox has published a line-item budget, but reporting from the shoot shows where the money went.

• Schedule Overruns: Filming began in the autumn of 2014 and was supposed to wrap in March 2015, but cameras were still rolling in August, according to The Hollywood Reporter. A planned two-week break in December stretched to six weeks, long enough that Tom Hardy had to drop out of Suicide Squad (2016).
• Natural Light and Sequential Shooting: Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki lit the film only with daylight, and Iñárritu shot it largely in story order. Iñárritu said in 2014 that shooting chronologically would add $7,000,000 to the budget, and in February 2015 he said that reaching and leaving the remote locations used up 40% of each shooting day.
• Remote Locations: Most locations were within a few hours' drive of Calgary, Alberta, but location manager Robin Mounsey said the director wanted places off the beaten track. Some needed new roads, and in protected parkland heavy equipment had to be kept off the ground. The studio had wanted to shoot entirely in British Columbia for its tax breaks before the filmmakers persuaded it to back Alberta, which offered a production grant of up to 30% of local spending, capped at CA$5,000,000.
• The Argentina Ending: With too little snow left in Canada for the final scenes, the production moved to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina in August 2015. One insider told TheWrap that the six-day Patagonia shoot alone cost an unplanned $10,000,000.
• Cast Contracts: DiCaprio and Hardy were signed to pay-or-play deals, which meant they would be paid whether or not the film was finished. When financier Worldview Entertainment pulled out in July 2014, Fox cited those contracts in declining to put in more money, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
• Visual Effects: Industrial Light & Magic produced most of the effects, with Moving Picture Company and Cinesite contributing. The work earned an Academy Award nomination and won all three Visual Effects Society Awards it was nominated for.

How Does The Revenant's Budget Compare to Similar Films?

At $135,000,000, The Revenant was financed on the scale of an action blockbuster rather than a prestige drama. Figures below are Box Office Mojo's, across all releases.

• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014): Budget $18,000,000 | Worldwide $103,215,094. Iñárritu's previous film won Best Picture on a small budget. The Revenant cost 7.5 times as much and grossed about five times as much, so it earned far more in total but less per dollar of budget.
• Django Unchained (2012): Budget $100,000,000 | Worldwide $426,076,540. DiCaprio's previous Western, in which he played the villain. The Revenant cost 35% more and grossed 25% more, with DiCaprio carrying the film rather than supporting it.
• The Hateful Eight (2015): Budget $44,000,000 | Worldwide $155,787,628. Quentin Tarantino's winter Western opened on the same Christmas Day. The Revenant cost about three times as much and grossed about 3.4 times as much.
• Mad Max: Fury Road (2015): Budget $150,000,000 | Worldwide $380,456,026. Tom Hardy's other Best Picture nominee at the same Oscars cost $15,000,000 more and grossed $153,118,329 less.
• The Martian (2015): Budget $108,000,000 | Worldwide $630,621,406. Fox's other Best Picture nominee that season cost $27,000,000 less and grossed $97,047,051 more.
• The Lone Ranger (2013): Budget $215,000,000 | Worldwide $260,502,115. Disney's big-budget Western cost $80,000,000 more than The Revenant and grossed less than half as much worldwide.

The Revenant Box Office Performance

The Revenant opened in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles on December 25, 2015, a limited release that qualified it for the Academy Awards. It took $474,560 that weekend, an average of $118,640 per theater, and $1,556,901 before going wide. On January 8, 2016 it expanded to 3,375 theaters, topped the box office on its first day with $14,351,951 and earned $39,826,840 over the weekend, finishing second to Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) in that film's fourth weekend. It reached number one in its third weekend of wide release with $16,009,718, despite a blizzard across the East Coast, and was still in the top ten when it won three Oscars on February 28, by which point it had earned $170,659,760 domestically.

The original release finished with $183,637,894 in the United States and Canada and $349,312,609 internationally, for $532,950,503 worldwide. A 10th-anniversary IMAX re-release in February and March 2026 added $623,852, bringing the totals to $184,247,394 domestic, $349,326,961 international and $533,574,355 worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Neither Fox nor New Regency has published what it spent on marketing, so the measures below that depend on it cannot be calculated.

What the backers kept is known from Deadline's estimate. Its 2015 Most Valuable Blockbuster analysis, which weighs production, marketing and talent participations against box office and home entertainment and television revenue, put the film's net profit at about $61,600,000, a cash-on-cash return of 1.17, and ranked it the 19th most profitable film of 2015. Deadline wrote that, given the overruns, the film "could easily have been another Heaven's Gate" but was not. The Numbers estimates domestic DVD and Blu-ray sales at a further $39,972,751.

The Revenant earned 65.5% of its total outside the United States and Canada. China, where it was released on March 18, 2016, after its Oscar wins and with several cuts, was its biggest overseas market at $58,684,119, even though it opened second there behind Zootopia (2016). The United Kingdom followed with $32,888,019, then Germany with $28,790,742 and France with $28,238,162.

Because the marketing spend was never reported, Saturation does not calculate a per-dollar return for The Revenant; Deadline's net profit estimate is the closest published measure of what it earned for its backers.

The Revenant Production History

The film is based on Michael Punke's 2002 novel about the frontiersman Hugh Glass, who was mauled by a grizzly bear in 1823 and left for dead. Producer Akiva Goldsman bought the then-unpublished manuscript in August 2001, and David Rabe wrote an early script. Park Chan-wook took on the project with Samuel L. Jackson in mind before leaving it. In 2010 Mark L. Smith wrote a new adaptation for Steve Golin's Anonymous Content, with John Hillcoat attached to direct and Christian Bale in negotiations, but Hillcoat left in October 2010. Iñárritu signed on in August 2011, New Regency joined that November with 20th Century Fox as distributor, and Iñárritu said he wanted DiCaprio and Sean Penn for the two leads.

The project stalled in March 2012, and Iñárritu made Birdman first. He confirmed in April 2014 that DiCaprio would play Glass, and Tom Hardy was in talks by June to play John Fitzgerald, the trapper who abandons him. Financing was reworked that summer, when Worldview Entertainment, which had co-financed Birdman, pulled out after its chief executive left the company, and Fox declined to add money. Annapurna Pictures' Megan Ellison entered talks, and China's Guangdong Alpha Animation and Culture Company came in as a partial financier.

Filming began in southern Alberta in the autumn of 2014, with the cast and crew driving far into the Canadian wilderness each morning, usually with just enough natural light for a scene or two, as Deadline later described it. The bear attack was shot over three days in the Squamish Valley in British Columbia. The schedule kept slipping. Crew members told The Hollywood Reporter of heavy turnover, with many fired and others quitting, and during a break Iñárritu asked producer Mary Parent to get the production back on track. "As a director, if I identify a violin that is out of tune, I have to take that from the orchestra," Iñárritu said of the departures. DiCaprio said he could name "30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I've ever had to do," from going in and out of frozen rivers to sleeping in animal carcasses.

The weather caused the last major problem. The plan was to film the ending in Canada, but there was not enough snow, so the production moved to locations near the Río Olivia in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and finished in August 2015. The waterfall scenes were filmed at Kootenai Falls near Libby, Montana. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto composed the score, with additional music by Bryce Dessner, and the film premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles on December 16, 2015, nine days before its limited release.

Awards and Recognition

The Revenant led the 88th Academy Awards with 12 nominations and was recognized above all for DiCaprio's performance, Iñárritu's direction and Lubezki's cinematography.

• Academy Awards: Won Best Director for Iñárritu, his second in a row after Birdman; Best Actor for DiCaprio, his first Oscar; and Best Cinematography for Lubezki, his third in a row after Gravity (2013) and Birdman. The other nominations included Best Picture, which went to Spotlight (2015), and Best Supporting Actor for Tom Hardy, which went to Mark Rylance for Bridge of Spies (2015).
• Golden Globe Awards: Won Best Motion Picture Drama, Best Director and Best Actor in a Drama, from four nominations.
• British Academy Film Awards: Won five of its eight nominations, more than any other film that year: Best Film, Best Director, Best Leading Actor, Best Cinematography and Best Sound.
• Guild Awards: Iñárritu won the Directors Guild of America Award, DiCaprio the Screen Actors Guild Award for lead actor and Lubezki the American Society of Cinematographers Award. Jack Fisk won the Art Directors Guild Award for a period film, the sound team won the Cinema Audio Society Award, and the producers were nominated by the Producers Guild of America.
• Visual Effects Society Awards: Won all three of its nominations, including Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature and Outstanding Animated Performance in a Photoreal Feature.
• Critics' Choice Awards: Won Best Actor and Best Cinematography from nine nominations.

The score by Sakamoto and Alva Noto was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA but was ruled ineligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Score because it had been assembled from the music of more than one composer.

Critical Reception

Reviews were positive, with particular praise for DiCaprio's performance and Lubezki's cinematography. The Revenant holds 78% on Rotten Tomatoes from 402 critics, with an average rating of 7.9/10, and a Metacritic score of 76 out of 100 from 50 critics, indicating generally favorable reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus calls it "as starkly beautiful as it is harshly uncompromising." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B+, and 85% of those surveyed by PostTrak were positive.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called DiCaprio's work "a virtuoso performance, thrilling in its brute force and silent eloquence," and David Edelstein of Vulture called the film a "tour de force." Stephanie Zacharek of Time wrote that DiCaprio "gives the movie a beating heart." Others were less convinced. Justin Chang of Variety found it "an imposing vision" but "an inflated and emotionally stunted one," and Richard Brody of The New Yorker dismissed Lubezki's images as "pictorial ornament" laid over bland staging. The film ranked 22nd on Metacritic's list of the best films of 2015.