Pirates of the Caribbean movies had a $2 million snack budget

Movies are an expensive business.

Certainly, Hollywood budgets can seem excessive and bloated on paper, but they can be particularly interesting when you break those gargantuan numbers down.

As a retrospective of sorts to celebrate the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge, The Hollywood Reporter sat down with three of the first three films' stars to discuss what it's like to be part of such a monumental cinematic event.

That included Jack Davenport, who played Commodore James Norrington, who revealed that the craft services alone had a budget of around $2 million during the filming of the second and third Pirates of the Caribbean films, which were partially filmed simultaneously.

"I remember saying to him one day, ‘What is your budget for all this?’" he described. "He looked me square in the eye and said ‘essentially unlimited.’ I was like ‘what does that mean?’ He was like ‘I don’t know, $2 million.’ I was like ‘For snacks?’ And he was like ‘yeah?’ That sounds frivolous but it wasn’t. He obviously had to keep people fed. The point is that was just a snack line item."

Which sounds like a lot to spend on fancy crisps and dips, but it's worth bearing in mind the sheer scale of these productions would have required an incredible amount of manpower, from extras to crew members. Which equals an army of mouths to feed.

It's unknown how much Salazar's Revenge spent on crafts services and whether the crisps were any fancier or not, but the end result is in cinemas now.