The Mysterious Secrets of The Blair Witch Project
The film’s reported budget has varied, with $60,000 being the number that gets kicked around the most—but just like editing a movie to make the result look entirely spontaneous, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Sánchez told Entertainment Weekly in 2009 that “the original budget to get the film in the can was probably between $20,000 and $25,000. Then, once we got to Sundance to make a print and do a sound mix, we were probably more in the neighborhood of $100,000.” Then the studio put around $500,000 into it, ordering a new sound mix and asking them to shoot a less ambiguous ending. “So,” Sanchez concluded, “the budget of what you saw in the theaters was probably $500,000 to $750,000.”
They stuck with their original ending in the meantime.
Myrick told The Guardian in 2018, however, that The Blair Witch Project cost about $35,000 to shoot and ended up costing about $300,000 overall to put out.
Regardless of the final figure, it went on to make $248.6 million worldwide and remains one of the highest-grossing independent movies of all time, with one of the biggest-ever returns on an initial investment.