In 1991, Terminator 2: Judgement Day shocked the industry with its $100 million budget, making it the most expensive movie ever made at the time. But gone are the days when $100 million felt like a lot of money to make a movie. In 2026 alone, studios made that figure seem like pocket change, with multiple movies requiring at least $250 million to cover production costs. One movie, in particular, made everything else look like a bargain by nearly doubling that figure. Franchise fatigue apparently doesn’t apply once the check clears.
The reasons behind these massive budgets are as varied as the movies themselves. Some of it is down to practical old-school filmmaking that costs a fortune to pull off correctly. Some of it is because of those huge star paydays that make headlines on their own. And some of it is animation work that viewers never even see on screen. Here’s where the money actually went.
5. Spider-Man: Brand New Day ($225 Million)
The fact that this movie cost that much to make doesn’t really come as too much of a surprise. For starters, any visual effects artist pretty much agrees that the most difficult thing to animate is a guy web-swinging through Manhattan without making the background look like a video game. That takes armies of artists staring at their screens until their eyes cross.
Then there’s Mark Ruffalo, Tom Holland, and Zendaya cashing checks enough to buy a small island. And the marketing? Sony wants to remind audiences that Spider-Man is still their golden goose, and that costs a pretty penny too. For context, the original 2002 movie with Tobey Maguire cost $139 million total. Adjusted for inflation, that’s close to $258 million in 2026. So inflation isn’t really the story here. What’s really changed, then? Everyone’s definition of “necessary,” most likely.
4. The Odyssey ($250 Million)
While Spider-Man leaned on modern effects to fake its way through Manhattan, Christopher Nolan obviously thought it was too easy and completely did the opposite. By now, it’s obvious he doesn’t ever choose the easy option. And his latest movie saw him make that statement in the biggest way he ever has.
Nolan shot his version of The Odyssey on 70mm IMAX film, a format so demanding it needs massive cameras and specialized crews just to load them properly. Picture a camera that weighs as much as a baby grand piano. Then add custom mirror rigs built just to keep it steady. They reportedly burned through over two million feet of film stock, and at roughly $1.50 per foot, that’s about $3 million on film alone. Toss in a cast that reads like the who’s who of Hollywood, and suddenly it makes sense how this one hit a quarter of a billion dollars while keeping the CGI to a bare minimum.
3. Toy Story 5 ($250 Million)
You might think that switching from film to animation would be enough to save some money. Toy Story 5 has proven that hypothesis to be false. The cost simply moves to another department. At Pixar, every single frame comes out of server farms that run nonstop. And keeping that process rolling is costly. The paychecks of the animators pile up fast across a project with this many moving parts.
This one reportedly matches the budgets of Disney’s biggest animated movies ever. And Pixar has also been a little paranoid since the Toy Story 2 near-disaster in the ‘90s, when a computer glitch nearly wiped the entire movie. At the time, they had to rebuild the entire thing from a backup copy sitting on an employee’s home computer. There’s also the fact that scripts get rewritten until every joke lands properly, and that’s not cheap either. Years of that kind of attention to detail and chase for perfection are what lead to a $250 million budget.
2. Moana (£250 Million)
Real ocean water sounds cheaper than fake water. While that’s true in theory, practically it’s a whole other thing. They had to sit on a boat in Hawaii, struggled to get the perfect shot, the waves had a mind of their own, and the sun kept moving. On top of that, they had to match all of that to the CGI water back in Atlanta. That’s two locations. Two crews. Two sets of logistics that are enough to make a producer’s hair fall out.
On top of that, Dwayne Johnson took $30 million of the $250 million it cost to make this movie as both star and producer. His fee alone would comfortably fund a small indie movie. Disney also wanted this one to feel grounded as opposed to another green screen debacle, and they managed to achieve that. But that trade-off for authenticity requires a much larger budget. Sadly for Disney, audiences didn’t show up for the movie the way they’d hoped, and it really hurt the movie’s box office numbers.
1. Avengers: Doomsday ($400 Million)
Somewhere, Kevin Feige is probably loosening his tie just thinking about this one. Robert Downey Jr.’s deal to play Doctor Doom is reportedly worth around $50 million, though some reports push that number closer to double that. Either way, that’s a lot of zeroes for one actor. Then there’s the Russo brothers, who are reportedly getting $40 million to occupy the director’s chair, and Chris Hemsworth is bagging $15 million for showing up and flexing his muscles as Thor.
Visual effects on this scale don’t come cheap, and multiple reports have confirmed that there were rewrites during production. None of that includes the marketing budget, which some reports have pegged at over $300 million on top of the production budget. Whatever the final number ends up being, this is the one every other movie on this list is looking up to.
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