All Feature Films
Spend in Australia

Amount and proportion of expenditure in Australia by Australian and foreign features, 1994/95–2017/18

Since 1994/95, when the monitoring of this indicator began, the overall trend for expenditure in Australia, on both Australian and foreign features, has been upwards.

Annual expenditure in the second half of the 1990s averaged $186 million, and by the conclusion of the 2000s had reached $320 million (including PDV-only). The first eightyears of the current decade reports annual expenditure of $482 million (including PDV-only).

Stand-out years:

• 2003/04 recorded annual expenditure of $449 million (excluding PDV-only) for all productions. Notable high-budget titles that commenced production that year include the Australian animated feature Happy Feet and the US features Son of the Mask, Star Wars – Episode III and Stealth.
• 2009/10 recorded annual expenditure of $453 million (including $10 million of PDV-only work) which can be attributed to the comparatively greater number of titles (53 including PDV-only titles) that commenced production in that year as well as those with a high budget, including foreign titles The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, as well as local titles Killer Elite and Sanctum.
• 2013/14 recorded annual expenditure of $517 million (including PDV-only), the highest on record. Titles that commenced production that year include the high-budget domestic films The Gods of Egypt and The Water Diviner and foreign features Unbroken, San Andreas, The Moon and the Sun and The Inbetweeners.
• 2016/17 recorded an all-time record when $521 million was spent here. Six projects started shooting that year, including Thor: Ragnarok, Aquaman and Pacific Rim: Uprising, along with Bleeding Steel (China), Parindey (India) and Bad Genius (Thailand).
• In 2008/09, there were no US productions taking place in Australia for the first time since production recording started in 1988.
• Over the last eight years, feature spend in Australia by foreign productions averaged 44 per cent. In terms of the proportion of total production budgets that are actually spent in Australia, Australian features tend to spend almost all their budget here, while for foreign features the proportion is lower. Over the 24 years from July 1994 to June 2018, Australian features spent 86 per cent of their total production budgets in Australia, while the proportion for foreign features is just 51 per cent.