Some friends and I are involved in a kind of “fantasy movie studio” league, in which we draft films before they’re released and score points based on how it performs. But rather than simply measure perfomance based on gross box office receipts, we index the gross receipts to the production budget. This makes it more interesting and requires more thought than simply rushing to draft the next Spider-man movie, the next Pirates movie, etc. Smaller films can also score well.
This works great except for the cases when we can’t find a budget anywhere. I picked the film “Waitress,” which performed modestly well for a film of its size, but I’ve scoured the internet, and, although I find lots of references to it being a “low budget” film, or a film with a budget of “a few million dollars,” I can’t find a specific figure.
This is all background to my actual question. I was able to find out that Fox Searchlight purchased the distribution rights to the film for $4 million. So my question is: can I assume, in the absence of any additional information, that the **most ** the film’s production budget could be is $4 million?