Magic Touch As Marvel’s ‘Moon Knight’ Comes In On Budget

Marvel Studios has revealed that its hit streaming series based on supernatural superhero Moon Knight was “within the agreed budget” as its costs came to $147.9 million (£121.3 million).

The six-part series debuted on the Disney+ platform in March last year and stars Oscar Isaac as the eponymous hero whose powers were granted to him by the Egyptian moon god Khonshu.

The series was helmed by Egyptian Mohamed Diab, the first Arab director to lead a Marvel project. His masterful financial management stands in stark contrast to the ballooning budget of Marvel’s latest streaming series, Secret Invasion, which cost more than $210 million as we revealed. The show was panned by critics and debuted to Marvel’s second-lowest audience with just 994,000 viewers watching Secret Invasion in its first five days, according to media analysts Samba TV.

In contrast, Samba TV’s data shows that Moon Knight had the second-highest opening of any Marvel streaming series with 1.8 million households in the US tuning in over its first five days. Nielsen adds that its premiere episode was watched for 418 million minutes during that time with the series racking up nearly 3.7 billion minutes over its entire run. Moon Knight was praised for having a darker tone than many of Marvel’s other productions and unlike a lot of them it didn’t blow the budget to do it.

Budgets of television shows are usually a closely-guarded secret as studios tend to absorb the cost of individual programmes in their overall expenses without itemizing how much they spent on each one. Shows made in the United Kingdom are exceptions to this as their costs are consolidated in individual production companies which file publicly-available financial statements. Moon Knight is one of them.

The production companies have code names so that they don’t raise attention when filing for permits to shoot off-site. Moon Knight was made by a Marvel subsidiary called Spectorcorp Productions UK in a nod to the company the hero creates in the comics to fund his crime-fighting activities.

Using a UK production company is the first step to benefiting from Britain’s Television Tax Relief scheme which allows studios to claim a cash reimbursement of up to 25% of the amount they spend in the country. There is a low threshold as to what constitutes being made in the UK.

At least 10% of the core costs of the production need to relate to activities in the UK. On the face of it, Moon Knight appears to have spent much more than that there. London is showcased extensively in several episodes as Moon Knight’s alter-ego, Steven Grant, works there at the British Museum.

Everything from Tottenham Court Road metro station to the Tower of London and Trafalgar Square appear on-screen along with a steady stream of the capital’s famous red double-decker buses. However, not a single scene was actually filmed in London as the pandemic closed the doors of the UK’s studios when Marvel planned to make Moon Knight there in 2020.

Production was switched from the Pinewood Studios in the UK to its counterpart in Atlanta though the crew still filmed on location. In an interview with Egyptian website Fil Fan, Diab said that he originally hoped to film the series in Egypt but was unable to do so due to the difficulty of obtaining permits. He added that he dislikes seeing “productions whose events take place in Egypt filmed in other countries”. Giving further detail, he explained that “some of the films shot outside Egypt do not show the real Egypt, as they are only interested in showing the pyramids and the desert as if Egypt were an old, backward country.”

As an alternative to filming in his home country, Diab chose Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert which is also known also as the Valley of the Moon and is where scenes from Star Wars Episode XI: The Rise of Skywalker were shot.

In addition to shooting in Jordan, the production spent around six months in Hungary which stood in for many of the London locations. Diab told Fil Fan that “approximately 3 billion Egyptian pounds ($97 million) were spent in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, during the filming.” After being enhanced with computer-generated images, viewers couldn’t tell the difference and this still had a magic touch when it came to claiming the cash reimbursement.

Even though Moon Knight wasn’t filmed in the UK, it was still eligible for the reimbursement as the producers spent enough with companies based there. Visual effects firm Framestore transformed the streets of Hungary into London whilst theatrical costume supplier FBFX made Moon Knight’s mummy-esque white suit.

To qualify for the cash reimbursement, productions must then pass a points test based on their level of UK content, how much they promote UK creativity, heritage or diversity, how much filming was done in the UK and how many of the cast and crew are from the UK. Crucially, the production can earn points by showing the UK on screen, even if it was not actually filmed there.

The key condition is that the production must spend at least $1.2 million (£1 million) per broadcast hour and Moon Knight passed this with flying colours.

The latest financial statements for Spectorcorp Productions were filed last week and reveal that over nearly three years until the end of September 2022, its costs came to $147.9 million (£121.3m). This gives average spending of $24.7 million (£20.2 million) per episode but that wasn’t the end of the story.

Moon Knight also got a $5.1 million (£4.2 million) cash reimbursement bringing its net spending down to $142.8 million. The biggest return came from the streaming subscriptions it generated.

Disney+ has a total of 146.1 million subscribers on its books but hasn’t turned a profit since it was launched in 2019. It has lost a total of $10.7 billion since then causing Disney to bring back its former chief executive Bob Iger in a bid to stem the red ink.

Soon after he returned in November last year he announced that “instead of chasing (subscribers) with aggressive marketing and aggressive spend on content, we have to start chasing profitability.” If Moon Knight is anything to go by, that’s no bad thing.