My First Million · 3 min instead of 47 min · Oct 5, 2026
Movie studios spend more on marketing than on making the film
Sam ParrHost
Co-founder, Hampton
Founded the business newsletter The Hustle and sold it to HubSpot.
Shaan PuriHost · Co-host, My First Million
Sold Bebo to Twitch in 2019; co-founded the crypto newsletter Milk Road.
About this segment
A studio exec told Sam one film cost $14 million to make and $40 million to market. Filming takes about 30 days, but marketing spend is bigger than production.
From “3 businesses we think are about to blow up”, Oct 5, 2026. Watch the full episode
“for movies and video games, which are two of the kind of like biggest, you know, parts of the American economy, they spend more money on marketing than they do on actually making the product”
Sam Parrat 41:32 · My First Million41:32Takeaways
- A $14M movie carried a $40M marketing budget, $54M all in
- Principal photography often takes only 30 to 40 days
- Video games also spend as much on marketing as on development
In this episode
Full episode39:42Movie studios spend more on marketing than on making the film2:49
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 39:55
because when you think about the cost of making a movie, mind-blowing. So he was talking about a movie they made. He goes, yeah, it costs $14 million to make. Okay. How much do you spend on marketing? $40 million. So $14 million to make and $40 on marketing. Whoa. So the $14 million, does that include the actor's salary? Everything. Yeah. Full production costs. So it's $54 million all in for this.
- 40:17
All in. But this is very common. I was talking to a friend who made a movie and I was like, it had been three or four years since he had first told me about the idea to when it came out. And I was like, damn, that takes forever. But I guess that's just the creative process. And he's like, do you know how long filming takes for a movie? I was like, no. He goes, 30 days, 37 days for us. I was like, you shot the whole thing in 37 days?
- 40:40
He goes, yep, end to end, 37 days. And that's complete. I was like, was that fast? He goes, no, that's normal, 30 days. That's how long it normally takes to shoot these things. Is that for a normal movie? Now, the editing takes a long time, the post-production. What's that? A normal movie can only take 30 or 60 or 90 days? the actual shooting of the filming of the movie. Wow, I didn't have no idea.
- 41:00
So you spend time writing, getting it funded. That could take years sometimes to get it to for day one of principal production. And then afterwards, you have to do all the other mixing, mastering, color correction, all that stuff. That could take time. The edit can take a lot of time. And then you have the marketing and distribution. So the whole thing takes years. But the making of the movie, the actual, hey, lights, camera, action, go.
- 41:23
Say your lines. that thing's like 30 days, which is insane to me. Same thing with cost. Like, I think the Grand Theft Auto games, they would spend like a couple hundred million making the game, like years of development and engineering time and animation and all that stuff. But then they would spend equally like hundreds of millions on marketing. And like, maybe not Grand Theft Auto specifically, but video game, for the video game industry is very common to do that.
- 41:44
So for movies and video games, which are two of the kind of like biggest, you know, parts of the American economy, they spend more money on marketing than they do on actually making the product, which is some people would say it's kind of sad, but it's kind of crazy. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have