Universal beat Disney to make the most expensive movie EVER: Jurassic World Dominion
UK filings show Jurassic World Dominion cost $658.8 million, topping Disney’s The Force Awakens. The pandemic shoot ran so long the cast ran up a $600-a-night hotel tab, which by Disney World standards is a bargain.
There’s a new record holder for the most expensive movie ever made, and it has dinosaurs in it.
Money, uh, finds a way.
According to financial filings dug up by Fortune, Universal spent $658.8 million making 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion. That edges out the old champ, Disney’s 2015 Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which ran $638.9 million. Universal takes the crown from Disney.
How Jurassic World Dominion hit $659 million
The number got that big mostly because of when it was made.
Dominion shot in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, which turned a normal blockbuster into a money pit. Universal had to run costly safety protocols, eat months of delays that pushed the release back a full year, and keep paying for soundstages and leased gear it couldn’t return without losing access.
It also kept producers and department heads on the payroll through the downtime just to make sure they’d still be available whenever filming could resume. Idle is expensive when the whole industry is frozen.
The $600-a-night hotel that dented the budget
Here’s the detail that turns a spreadsheet into a story.
During a five-month quarantine, the A-list cast was put up at Marriott’s Langley Hotel, an 18th-century manor near Pinewood Studios outside London. Rooms there run more than $600 a night, and Fortune notes the bill was big enough to register on the movie’s bottom line.
It wasn’t a bad place to be stuck. The hotel’s wood-panelled lounge has a piano, and Jeff Goldblum spent lockdown playing old jazz standards on it while Sam Neill sang along, footage that went viral at the time.
By Disney World standards, that’s a bargain
And this is where it gets funny.
Six hundred dollars a night for a historic English manor sounds extravagant until you’ve tried to book a room at the company Universal just dethroned. A night at a Walt Disney World Deluxe resort regularly tops $900, and the flagship Grand Floridian can climb well past a thousand dollars before you’ve bought a single churro.
So the same studio that just spent a record-breaking fortune housed its movie stars for less per night than a family of four pays to sleep within monorail distance of Cinderella Castle. Disney lost the most-expensive-movie title and still charges more for a hotel room.
The most expensive movie ever barely made money
The wild part is that all that spending didn’t translate to a hit on paper.
Filming in the UK let Universal claw back $127.8 million through Britain’s film tax-credit scheme, dropping its net cost to about $531 million. Dominion pulled in close to $1 billion at the box office, but studios only keep roughly half of ticket sales, so its theatrical run actually came up slightly short. The profit came later, from streaming, Blu-ray, and merchandise.
Stack the recent trilogy together and the pattern holds. Without that UK reimbursement, Universal’s profit on the last three Jurassic films would have been close to zero.
Why this record could stand for years
That tax credit is the whole reason these movies film in Britain, and it’s why Disney, Amazon, and Netflix have all set up shop there too. UK film spending hit a record $3.8 billion last year.
It’s also the part that might freeze the rankings. President Trump has repeatedly threatened a 100% tariff on movies made in “foreign lands,” and if that ever takes effect and studios lose their British financing, nobody’s going to casually drop $659 million on a single film again. Dominion could sit on top of the list for a long, long time, which is a strange legacy for a movie most people barely remember.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Fortune (June 17, 2026), Christian Sylt’s exclusive, verified for the $658.8 million Dominion cost, the $638.9 million Force Awakens figure, the $600-a-night Langley Hotel detail, the Goldblum piano videos, the $127.8 million UK reimbursement, the trilogy economics, and the Trump movie-tariff threat
Theme Park Shark and Mousesavers (2026), verified for Disney World Deluxe resort rates running $450 to $1,000-plus per night and the Grand Floridian topping $900 and beyond
British Film Institute, via Fortune (2026), verified for UK film production spending rising 31% to a record $3.8 billion