There often seems to be a direct connection between budget and box office in Hollywood. All it takes is a look down the list of the highest-grossing films of all time to see that almost all of the top ten have budgets well in excess of $200 million. The holy grail for any studio is making movies which cost less than that and enter its top ten. Most studios struggle to keep the cost of blockbusters below $200 million let alone do that and make a movie which goes straight to number one. Netflix is an exception.

As this report revealed, last year Netflix released the dark fantasy film Damsel which cost just $145.1 million to make and became the streamer’s most-watched movie in its first week of release. Between its March debut and the end of June, Damsel attracted 143 million views making it the most-watched Netflix film in the first half of 2024. Only in Hollywood could lightning strike twice.

In second place on that ranking was Lift, an action comedy with an A List cast including Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jacob Batalon, Jean Reno and Sam Worthington. The movie tells the story of a female master thief and her ex-boyfriend who team up to orchestrate a midair heist of $500 million in gold bullion from a passenger plane.

Lift was an overnight success and soared straight to number one on Netflix’s list of the most-watched English-language movies. In its first week of streaming in January it attracted 32.8 million views and by the middle of last year the tally had hit 129 million, putting it second only to Damsel. Remarkably, it cost even less to make.

Budgets of movies are usually a closely-guarded secret as studios tend to absorb the costs of individual pictures in their overall expenses and don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. It’s a different story for movies like Lift which was largely made in the United Kingdom and on location at glamorous locations such as Venice and the Italian ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo.

While the U.K. may be most famous for England, with its historic Pinewood and Shepperton studios, it also comprises Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Lift was filmed in Northern Ireland which is home to Harbour Studios in Belfast, a relative newcomer to the movie-making scene as its doors swung open in 2017. It has had a rapid rise to fame.

Harbour Studios has already been used as the main production base for the first two seasons of the television series Krypton as well as New Regency’s The Northman feature film, Netflix movie The School for Good & Evil and the live action version of How to Train Your Dragon which will be released by Universal in June as this report explained.

Many of Lift’s indoor scenes were shot at Harbour Studios, including the cabin of the plane, Brussels’ Flight Centre and security at Heathrow Airport. It was also filmed at a number of historic buildings in the region including Ulster University, Shackleton Barracks, Belfast’s Crown Liquor Saloon and Whitehead railway station, which doubled for its counterpart in Cortina. Hart stayed for a few months at the five star Culloden Estate resort just outside Belfast and performed a number of impromptu comedy shows in the city. He had good reason to be there.

Studios shoot in the U.K. to benefit from the government’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country.

To qualify for the reimbursement, at least 10% of the production costs need to relate to activities in the U.K. and in order to prove this to the government studios set up a separate production company there for each movie they make. The companies have to file financial statements which reveal everything from the headcount and salaries to the total costs and the level of reimbursement. It takes a bit of detective work to get the information.

The companies usually have code names so that they don’t raise attention with fans when filing permits to film on location. Tallying the company names with the productions they are responsible for requires deep industry knowledge which my colleague and I have built up over nearly 15 years. We are the only reporters worldwide who specialize in covering the U.K. film production companies for national media and we have reported on them for more than 10 leading titles including The Times of London, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the London Evening Standard.

The filings have a public interest in the U.K. media as the reimbursement to the studios comes from taxpayers’ money. Outside the U.K. the interest is in the bigger picture – the production costs.

The Netflix subsidiary behind Lift is called Skyscraper Productions and as with all U.K. companies, its filings are released in stages long after the period they relate to. It explains why its latest filings are for the year ending 31 December 2023. That covers all the filming and post production as the movie was released just days after the date on the documents.

The filings show that by the end of 2023, the cost of making the movie came to just $132 million (£115.5 million) with one of the biggest single expenses being the $7.3 million (£6.5 million) spent on staff which peaked at 67 full-time monthly employees. In contrast, Damsel hit 91 while Disney’s Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker had 672 staff on its books in 2019. As with any film shoot, the vast majority of the crew were freelancers, contractors and temporary workers who don’t appear as employees in the production company’s filings.

Netflix made the most of its entitlements for Lift as the government reimbursed it $27.3 million (£23.6 million) with a further $1.6 million (£1.5 million) coming from Northern Ireland’s Screen Fund Production Awards. It brought Netflix’s net spending on the movie down to just $103.1 million which is an astonishing achievement as it is less than half the cost of many rival productions. It doesn’t stop there as the earnings statement adds that the total costs of the movie “were less than the budgeted costs”.

This is all the more impressive as Lift’s release date was pushed back five months from August 2023 due to Hollywood being in the grip of the writers’ and actors’ strikes. Some studios used the delays as a reason to tinker with partially complete productions but not Netflix. The streamer has been contacted for comment on its magic formula for cost containment and this report will be updated if it responds. The benefits extend far beyond its bottom line.

The latest data from the British Film Institute (BFI) shows that in 2019, every $1.31 (£1) of reimbursement handed to studios generated $10.88 (£8.30) of additional Gross Value Added (GVA) benefit for the U.K. economy. It led to a total of $10.1 billion (£7.7 billion) in GVA being generated by the fiscal incentives for film in 2019.

Released in December 2021, the BFI’s triennial Screen Business report showed that between 2017 and 2019, the fiscal incentives to studios generated a record $17.7 billion (£13.5 billion) of return on investment to the U.K. economy and created more jobs than ever before. Filming in the U.K. doesn’t just create jobs for locals, it also drives spending on services such as security, equipment hire, transport and catering.

In 2019, this generated 37,685 jobs in London and 7,775 throughout the rest of the U.K. The report added that when the wider impacts of the film content value chain are taken into consideration, 49,845 jobs were created in London in 2019 and 19,085 throughout the rest of the U.K.

Despite Hollywood being paralyzed by the strikes for more than six months in 2023, the U.K. still got a magic touch from the fiscal incentives as foreign studios contributed around 77% of the $1.8 billion (£1.4 billion) spent on making films there. Between 2020 and 2023 Netflix alone invested almost $6 billion in the U.K. shooting shows and films. As long as the rich rewards for studios remain in place, that total seems set to rise.