Ten years ago Netflix rocked the media industry with the debut of Beasts of No Nation, Cary Fukunaga’s violent film about child soldiers in Africa. Its gritty theme wasn’t the only reason that the movie made waves.

Beasts of No Nation was the first film to debut on Netflix at the same time as in theaters which ruffled the feathers of four of the largest exhibitors in the United States at the time – AMC Cinemas, Carmike Cinemas, Cinemark and Regal. They believed that the online release was a violation of the traditional 90-day window of exclusivity to theaters so announced that they would boycott Beasts of No Nation.

It was their loss as the movie was a hit with critics and audiences alike. The former rated it 91% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes whilst it got a 92% score from the latter. In turn this put Netflix in the spotlight and spurred it to develop its own slate of movies.

Called Netflix Originals, they are generally produced, financed and exclusively distributed by the platform. In order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible they are made in different countries and come in many languages. At the upper end of the spectrum are movies featuring megastars who have global appeal. They come at quite a price but it pays off.

The latest in this series is Back in Action, a comedy action flick starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx as a pair of married former CIA spies who are pulled back into espionage after their secret identities are exposed. Rounding out the A List cast is Glenn Close who plays an ex-MI6 sniper and the estranged mother of Diaz’s character. The fittingly-named film is the first movie role Diaz has had in 10 years and it comes from a bygone era.

Like the 1990s spy comedies that inspired it, the plot is clearly clichéd and this hasn’t escaped viewers’ attention. Since Back in Action was released on January 17 there have been more than 1,000 reviews of it on Rotten Tomatoes giving it an average audience rating of just 60% whilst critics scored it even lower at 25%. However, it still rocketed to the top of the Netflix global list of the most-watched English movies with 88.9 million hours of viewing in its opening week. It didn’t come cheap.

Although the movie is a globetrotting adventure stretching from Atlanta to eastern Europe, it was actually made at the historic Pinewood Studios in the United Kingdom which lifts the curtain on how much it cost.

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. Netflix didn’t respond to an opportunity to comment for this report and it didn’t need to because the amount it spent on Back in Action is laid bare in its own filings.

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. That was no problem for Netflix as Back in Action wasn’t just filmed at Pinewood but action sequences were also shot on London’s river Thames and at its barrier which prevents the city from flooding and bursts open in the film.

In order to prove to the government how much money they spent in the U.K., 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 financial statements of 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 financial statements 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 Netflix subsidiary behind Back in Action is called Oasis Productions and it recently released its latest filings which shine a spotlight on its spending.

As with all U.K. companies, the financial statements are released in stages long after the period they relate to which explains why Oasis Productions’ latest filings are for the year to December 31, 2023. That was eight months after filming wrapped but a year before the movie premiered so there was still a year remaining for post-production work which could add to its expenses.

The financial statements show that by the end of 2023, the cost of making the movie came to $207.2 million (£165.5 million) with one of the biggest single expenses being the $13 million (£10.4 million) spent on staff which peaked at 142 people. Despite having a blockbuster budget, Netflix actually saved money on the movie as the filings add that the total costs “were less than the budgeted costs.” The U.K. government handed Netflix a $48.3 million (£38.5 million) reimbursement for Back in Action bringing the net spending on it down to $158.9 million (£127 million). It makes an impact.

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 UK 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 gripped by 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, it seems unlikely that the streamer will bring the curtain down on filming there any time soon.