With a whopping $250 million budget, Dwayne Johnson’sRed Oneis the most expensive Christmas movie ever made, but plenty of other holiday classics have cost a pretty penny, too. Some of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time have been produced for a relatively slim budget.Home Alone,Gremlins, andThe Santa Clauseall cost less than $25 million to make.ElfandDie Hardcost a little more to produce, because they required a lot of special effects, but they would still barely coverRed One’s catering budget.
But some stories cost a lot of money to tell. Bringing Santa and his flying reindeer to life on-screen doesn’t come cheap. The motion-capture animation required to make Robert Zemeckis’A Christmas CarolandThe Polar Expresstook tens of millions of dollars to pull off. The star-studded casts of movies likeThe HolidayandDaddy’s Home 2drove up the price of production. No other Christmas movie has cost quite as much to produce asRed One, but a few others have come close.
10Daddy’s Home 2
$69 Million
AfterThe Other Guysduo Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg were reunited forDaddy’s Home, it ended up being an even bigger box office success than their previous collaboration. It didn’t take long for Paramount to commission a sequel, andDaddy’s Home 2was in theaters just two years after its predecessor. The firstDaddy’s Homehad one Christmas-themed scene, with the two competing fathers throwing an early Christmas for their kids, butDaddy’s Home 2is a full-blown Christmas movie.
The sequel introduced the fathers of the fathers; Ferrell’s dad was played by John Lithgow and Wahlberg’s dad was played by Mel Gibson. This star-studded ensemble ensured that the sequel was a laugh riot, but it also ensured that it needed a bigger budget than the first film.Daddy’s Home 2cost $69 million to produce (viaBox Office Mojo).
9Die Hard 2
$70 Million
It’s often said that for a movie to be considered successful, it has to gross around 2.5 times its budget. ButDie Hardwas so successful that its sequel scored a budget of 2.5 times its budget.Die Hard 2cost a hefty $70 million to produce (viaThe Numbers). While thelaterDie Hardsequels would abandon the holiday season,Die Hard 2copied the original’s Christmas setting (and just about everything else from the first film).
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This time, John McClane is tasked with stopping the terrorist siege of an airport, not a skyscraper. And his wife is circling the runway in a plane running low on fuel, not being held hostage in her office. Bruce Willis was launched to stardom byDie Hard, so his salary was much steeper when the sequel came around — and blowing up planes ain’t cheap.
8The Grinch
$75 Million
In 2018, Dr. Seuss’How the Grinch Stole Christmas!was adapted for the screen for a third time, this time in the form of an animated effort for the big screen. Simply titledThe Grinch, it cost $75 million to make (viaBox Office Mojo). That might sound like a lot, but it’s a relatively slim budget for an animated feature from a major studio.The Grinchwas produced by Illumination, the masters of reasonably priced animation.
The Grinchwent on to gross an impressive $540 million, so it made back its budget more than seven times over. This made itthe highest-grossing Christmas movie of all time, beating out the previous record holder,Home Alone. IfThe Grinchhad cost $200 million like some animated films, then it might not have been considered so successful.
7Batman Returns
$80 Million
After 1989’sBatmanbecame a massive box office success, Warner Bros. enticed both director Tim Burton and star Michael Keaton to come back for a sequel with the promise of creative control and a much larger budget of $80 million (viaBox Office Mojo). There’s been some debate overwhether or notBatman Returnsis a Christmas movie; it takes place at Christmas, but it’s not very Christmasy. In fact, it’s so dark that it ended up alienating audiences and underperforming at the box office.
Whether it counts as a Christmas movie or not, it was expensive to produce. After the success of the first film, Burton and Keaton could name their price. They also brought in other costly stars like Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher Walken. On top of that,Batman Returnshad plenty of high-priced sets, costumes, props, and action sequences.
6The Holiday
$85 Million
Nancy Meyers’The Holidaymight not look as expensive asThe Grinch, but it actually cost even more to produce. Meyers had enjoyed a string of back-to-back hits withThe Parent Trap,What Women Want, andSomething’s Gotta Give, so the studios felt comfortable entrusting her with a blockbuster budget of $85 million (viaBox Office Mojo).The Holidayrevolves around two heartbroken women from different sides of the Atlantic — one American and one British — who arrange a home exchange over the Christmas season.
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The Holidaydidn’t need any big, expensive special effects likeDie Hard 2orBatman Returns, but it did need to pay the salaries of some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet play the two home-swappers, while Jude Law and Jack Black play their love interests, respectively. That’s a lot of A-list paychecks.
5The Nutcracker And The Four Realms
$120 Million
Disney lost a lot of money on 2018’sThe Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which reportedly cost the studio $120 million to produce (viaDeadline). It was conceived as a big-budget adaptation of Marius Petipa and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1892 balletThe Nutcracker. But the fatal flaw in that concept is that blockbuster audiences don’t usually show up for movies based on ballets, and this was no exception.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realmshad an infamously messy production, which likely drove up the costs and ballooned the budget. Lasse Hallström was initially announced as director, butJurassic Park III’s Joe Johnston did such extensive reshoots that he ended up scoring a co-directing credit alongside Hallström.The Nutcracker and the Four Realmsbarely recouped its production budget, making it a pretty notorious box office bomb.
4How The Grinch Stole Christmas
$123 Million
The animatedGrinchmovie wasn’t cheap, but the live-action one cost a lot more — and it was produced several years of inflation earlier than the cartoon. Ron Howard’sHow the Grinch Stole Christmaswas the firstfeature-length adaptation of a Dr. Seuss bookand the first live-action adaptation. And based on how much it cost to bring Seuss’ vision to life — $123 million (viaBox Office Mojo) — it’s easy to see why more studios didn’t jump at the chance.
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Jim Carrey was one of the biggest movie stars in the world at the time, so he could charge a pretty penny. The crew utilized elaborate practical sets for key locations like Whoville and the Grinch’s cave on Mount Crumpit, then used cutting-edge visual effects to digitally enhance those sets to resemble Seuss’ iconic illustrations. It was quite the undertaking, and it wasn’t cheap.
3The Polar Express
$170 Million
In the past couple of decades, Robert Zemeckis’ filmmaking has been defined by technological experimentation. Five years before James Cameron would releaseAvatar, Zemeckis experimented with motion-capture technology in his animated Christmas adventureThe Polar Express. At the time, it was the most expensive animated movie ever made with a whopping budget of $170 million (via theL.A. Times). In 2006,The Polar Expressearned a Guinness World Record for being the first all-digital capture film.
Developing new filmmaking technologies (and figuring out how to use them) isn’t cheap, which is whyThe Polar Expresscost so much, and it’s also risky, because it means the kinks haven’t been ironed out yet. Some audiences avoidedThe Polar Expressbecause the animation slipped into the uncanny valley. As a result, it received mixed reviews and disappointed at the box office.
2A Christmas Carol
$200 Million
Five years afterThe Polar Express, Zemeckis decided to make another animated Christmas movie with motion-capture technology — and this time, he spent even more money on it. Zemeckis’ motion-capture adaptation of the Charles Dickens classicA Christmas Carolcost Disney a whopping $200 million to produce (viaBox Office Mojo). There’sno shortage of movies based onA Christmas Carol(withThe Muppet Christmas Carolbeing unironically the best of the bunch), but none of them have looked quite like Zemeckis’ expressionistic 3D rendering.
This version ofA Christmas Carolis anchored by Jim Carrey’s fine performance(s). Carrey not only plays Ebenezer Scrooge, but all three of the ghosts that visit him on Christmas Eve. If anything, all the expensive motion-capture animation and 3D effects distract from the film’s true strength: the work of its incredible cast.
1Red One
$250 Million
Dwayne Johnson’s latest high-concept action comedy,Red One, casts him as Santa Claus’ head of security, trying to save him from a witch. Although it was initially intended as a straight-to-streaming release for Prime Video, Amazon MGM eventually decided to put it in theaters.Red Onecost an exorbitant $250 million to produce (viaVariety), making it not only the most expensive Christmas movie ever made, but one of the most expensive movies ever made, period.
With its bland CG effects and obvious use of greenscreens,Red Onecertainly doesn’t look like it had a bigger budget thanAvatar— it looks like a run-of-the-mill streaming movie — so where did all that money go?TheWrapreports that Johnson’s habit of showing up several hours late to the set drove up the budget and added as much as $50 million to the overall cost. On top of that, Johnson was a producer on the film and, therefore, cut his own paycheck.
