Universal handed £6m of taxpayer cash to film Hamnet despite raking in profits of £810m

American filmmaking giant Universal was handed a £5.7 million government subsidy to make period drama Hamnet even though the studio generated £810 million in profit last year.

The blockbuster’s cost to taxpayers is revealed in filings for the film which won the coveted honour of Outstanding British Film at the Baftas on Sunday. The heartbreaking biopic centres on the death of Shakespeare’s son and stars Gladiator 2’s Paul Mescal as the bard.

Although he missed out on the best supporting actor award at the Baftas, his co-star Jessie Buckley got a gong for her role as Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes Hathaway. She could do the double at the upcoming Oscars, where Hamnet has been nominated in eight categories.

The picture was filmed over two months in summer 2024 in the chocolate-box Herefordshire town of Weobley and at Elstree Studios, where Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao built a replica of the Globe Theatre as the original in London was deemed to look too lavish.

It was perhaps inevitable that such a quintessentially British story would be filmed in the UK but the government still gave Universal a multi-million-pound subsidy to tempt it to make the film here. The payment is common practice in the industry, and is part of an incentive scheme which shines a spotlight on the secretive world of film finances.

The budgets of films made in the US are usually kept confidential as studios combine the cost of them in their filings and don’t itemise how much they spend on each one. But it is a different story for pictures made in the UK.

Hamnet adds to booming UK film industry

The government gives studios a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5 per cent of the money they spend in the UK provided that it represents at least 10 per cent of the film’s overall core costs. Studios typically set up separate companies for each movie they make in the UK and they have to file accounts which lift the curtain on everything from their total cost to the number of people in the crew.

It takes a bit of detective work to get to the bottom of this because the companies have code names so they don’t raise attention with fans when filing for permits to film on location.

Hamnet was made by Universal’s Rowan Tree Films company, which is named after Agnes Hathaway’s mother, and its latest accounts show that by the end of 2024, £28.4m had been spent on the movie with the average monthly crew members peaking at 71. Costs are expected to rise even higher as the film was not released until last month, meaning the £5.7m government subsidy came in handy.

In 2024, a total of £534m was handed to filmmakers and the Labour government has committed to maintaining the subsidies despite the UK being engulfed in a cost-of-living crisis fuelled by significant rises in employer National Insurance and higher taxes on savings.

In contrast, the UK film industry is booming and earlier this month the British Film Institute announced that spending on feature-film production in Britain rose 31 per cent last year to a record £2.8bn.