r/DCSpoilers

EDIT: To be more explicit - All information about the budget below comes directly from WB (S & K Pictures / Superman: Legacy) and the Ohio Film Department and was obtained via a public records request.

Reddit user flagged an article in which included the claim that the film

is expected to receive more than $11 million in tax credits. Superman: Legacy projects it will hire 3,254 Ohio residents, according to the application. The film’s total eligible production expenditures for the Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit were nearly $37 million, or a little more than 10% of the film’s total budget of more than $363.8 million.

This got a decent amount of traction on reddit and James Gunn responded OP on Threads denying the claim. Saying "How in the world do they think they know what our budget is."

The answer is actually pretty clear if you look for it. I googled the government website for the That page includes

Public Records Notice - All information submitted in connection with an application is subject to public records information disclosure pursuant to Ohio Revised Code 149.43, unless the information is protected by another statute including commercial or financial information pursuant to 122.36 of the Ohio Revised Code or data which consists of trade secrets, as defined in 1333.61 of the Ohio Revised Code.

...So I decided to do that. You're correctly not going to get access to trade secrets like the script Superman submitted but the budget information isn't restricted.

budget definition tangent: let's clarify that "reported" production budgets contain a mix of gross and net budgets (or really, gross budgets, net budgets and rounded down net budgets) with the generic one (especially for big budget films) being a slightly rounded down net budget. You can see this attested in multiple places and is why I took a stab in the dark at extrapolating to what this $363M number means for the films real production budget (basically I took 25% off the topline gross spend and rounded to nearest quarter million). If you want to be really conservative, you can say this implies a budget between $250M and $300M.

Superman Legacy filed a tax credit application for $36,972,289 and the full production budget is 363,845,386.00 so the Ohio spend represents 10.16% of the budget. ADDITIONALLY "25% of the production is being shot in Ohio" (another article reported this number). They have to provide all of this information due to . However, this section doesn't define "production budget."

Section 122.85. (B) For the purpose of encouraging and developing strong film and theater industries in this state, the director of development may certify a motion picture or broadway theatrical production produced by a production company as a tax credit-eligible production....Each application shall include the following information:...122.85.B(5) The total production budget; 122.85.B(6) The total budgeted eligible expenditures and the percentage that amount is of the total production budget of the motion picture or broadway theatrical production; 122.85.B(7) In the case of a motion picture, the total percentage of the production being shot in Ohio;

As a side-note, if you want to see all films that have applied for an Ohio Motion Picture Tax Credit, you can find it .

Here's the slightly condensed public tax credit record. I excluded principal cast/crew and removed phone/email (just to avoid headaches)

and here's Gunn's post

It's really cool that Gunn will respond to a post that's not gone viral on twitter but there really are limits to what you can extrapolate from them. James Gunn is just 100% wrong here and wrong in what should be for him an obvious way if he's giving a serious response as a WB executive. He's dunking on a guy who did good, basic journalistic work and by doing so increasing the visibility of a story WB isn't trying to publicize.