Original Budget Reveal: Did Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Underperform at the Box Office?
Disney spent a staggering $593.7 million (£450.2 million) to make Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, Forbes reports—vaulting the trilogy capper into the ranks of the most expensive films ever.
Disney finally said the quiet part out loud: what Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker actually cost. The number is huge, and it kind of rewrites how that $1 billion box office looks in hindsight.
The number that changes the math
Per Forbes, Disney has now disclosed the production budget for the 2019 finale. The tab came to $593.7 million (about £450.2 million). That puts it among the most expensive movies ever made, which, yes, you can pretty much feel on screen.
- Director: J.J. Abrams
- Cast: Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Anthony Daniels
- Runtime: 2h 22m
- Worldwide box office: over $1 billion (Box Office Mojo)
- Rotten Tomatoes critics score: 51% (lowest for a live-action Star Wars)
- Now streaming in the U.S.: Disney+
So... did a billion dollars actually win?
Here’s where the studio math gets un-fun. A common yardstick is the '2.5x rule': to cover production and marketing and then tip into profit, a movie needs to earn about 2.5 times its production budget. Using that shorthand, Rise of Skywalker would have needed roughly $1.4 billion to break even. It cleared a billion, but by that math, it likely fell short of true profitability. The exact figure depends on things like tax incentives, backend deals, and how marketing was accounted for, but the takeaway is the same: sky-high costs make that $1B haul a lot less triumphant.
Lowest-rated Star Wars (live-action) and why
Even before the budget number dropped, the reception told its own story. The movie sits at 51% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, the bottom of the live-action pile. Only the 2008 animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars scores lower at 18%.
Why the chillier response? A few reasons that came up again and again at the time:
The movie burns through plot like it’s late for a flight, trying to address The Last Jedi’s choices while also layering in new twists. That push-pull made the story feel rushed and messy. The big swing was bringing back Emperor Palpatine and leaning hard on nostalgia, but a lot of it went unexplained or felt reverse-engineered to appease everyone, which usually means pleasing no one. And compared to something like Avengers: Endgame, which stuck the landing emotionally, Rise of Skywalker looked spectacular but didn’t deliver the same catharsis. The action hits; the heart, not so much.
Where that leaves it
As the capper to the Skywalker Saga, it was supposed to be the mic drop. Instead, between the ballooned budget and a split reaction, it’s more complicated than the headline '$1 billion' suggests. If you want to revisit it (or argue with all of the above), it’s currently streaming on Disney+ in the U.S.