Move over, Star Wars — there’s a new budget-breaking king in town. And it’s not about Jedi or Sith. It’s about dinosaurs. Hungry, expensive, CGI-packed dinosaurs.

Universal Studios has officially dropped the mic (and millions of dollars) with Jurassic World: Dominion , the 2022 finale to the Jurassic World trilogy. According to Universal’s financial reports, the film cost a jaw-dropping $583.9 million to make — officially dethroning Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the most expensive movie ever produced.

Yes, you read that right. This dinosaur flick cost more than some small countries’ GDP.

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Why Was It So Damn Expensive?

You might be wondering: how do you spend almost $600 million on a movie where Chris Pratt mostly runs from bugs and raptors?

Well, turns out, making a global blockbuster during a global pandemic isn’t exactly cheap.

Filming took place largely in the UK in 2020, right when the world decided to shut down for a while. The cast, crew, and every caterer within a 10-mile radius were stuck in lockdown bubbles together. That meant:

• Quarantine hotels
• Daily health checks
• Sanitizing Chris Pratt’s jeep between takes
• Paying actors to sit around doing nothing but looking concerned

And then there were the special effects. Because if you’re going to bring back Jeff Goldblum in a tank top, you better also have enough CGI to melt a graphics card.

Not to mention the star-studded cast :

• Chris Pratt (still pretending he’s Indiana Jones)
• Bryce Dallas Howard (in heels, again)
• Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum returning like cinematic comfort food

This wasn’t just a movie. It was an event. A very, very expensive one.

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British Government to the Rescue (Sort Of)

Universal did get a helping hand — or rather, a £89.1 million one — from the UK government. Thanks to tax relief programs aimed at boosting the country’s film industry (especially during the chaos of a global health crisis), the studio managed to recoup part of its investment.

So technically, taxpayers helped fund a scene where a T. rex crashes through a McDonald’s billboard. You’re welcome.

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Box Office Roar

Despite mixed reviews (“More dinosaurs, less plot!” critics cried), Dominion made over $1 billion worldwide , proving once again that people will always pay to see CGI creatures destroy things — even if they’ve already seen it five times before.

It also marked the end of a trilogy that began with Jurassic World in 2015 — a saga that started with wonder, peaked with weird giant locusts, and ended with… well, let’s just say we’ll remember it for the merch.