A former developer who worked on the 2013 Deadpool action game says there’s no way it cost over $100M to make, despite long-standing rumors and even Wikipedia claiming otherwise.
“Not even close,” Chris Baker, a former developer who worked in Marvel’s games division at the time of Deadpool’s release, wrote on X of the rumored nine-figure budget. People insert this factoid into conversations about High Moon Studios’ game, but there’s actually no reliable source of that info. Wikipedia’s page for the most expensive games to develop cites a 2015 Gamespot listicle with no source either.
Baker took to X to dispute this claim after publishing a video retrospective of the Deadpool games he’s worked on over the years. “I wasn’t privy to the actual budget, but $100 million is GTA-level money, at least back then.” And he’s right: A 2008 Times profile of Leslie Benzies, a producer on Grand Theft Auto 4, quotes him estimating the budget to be around $100M.
An in-game joke about the game going way over budget features a superimposed counter that racks up millions of dollars in seconds, a ridiculous thing to base anything on, but one that Baker thinks could be related to the origin of the rumor. Given all the dead ends you run into when trying to find the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right. All it would’ve taken is someone on a forum somewhere presenting this as a fun fact about the project for the internet to canonize it regardless of its veracity.
While it seems like we’ll never know the real amount of money that was spent on what turned out to be a pretty mid superhero game (PC Gamer gave it a 60%), I don’t really expect the people to stop bringing it up when reminiscing about it, at least as long as Wikipedia continues to say it’s true.
