Madrid Is Paying for Woody Allen's 51st Film. He Hasn't Picked a Title Yet.

Woody Allen will begin shooting his 51st film in Madrid on Monday, October 5. The budget is a reported $14 million, of which €3 million — €1.5 million from the City Council of Madrid, €1.5 million from the Community of Madrid — is public money, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the total. The film does not yet have a title. The title is expected to include the word 'Madrid.' Allen has said he will choose it after the shoot, and that his confidence in the finished film will determine whether the name sounds bold or cautious — which is the most honest thing anyone involved in film financing has said all year.

The public money is not charity; it is industrial policy with better lighting. Madrid's institutions are backing the production partly because the city offers fewer tax exemptions than competing territories, and a €3 million contribution that lands a major international shoot is, by the cold math of film commissions, a reasonable bet. Allen, for his part, has said the story requires a diplomatic atmosphere, that he already knew Madrid from earlier visits, and that he found the city elegant and suitable for the script — which will mix, per the reports, comedy with romance, intrigue, and infidelity, the four food groups of the late Allen filmography.

This will be his third film shot in Spain, after Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Rifkin's Festival, and at 90, Allen is directing with a consistency that the rest of the industry — currently lighting nine figures on fire to open at $12 million — might study with some humility. Fourteen million dollars. Public money covering the gap the tax code wouldn't. A title to be determined by the director's own post-shoot self-assessment. There is something almost classical about the arrangement: the city gets its production, the filmmaker gets his film, and nobody has to pretend the thing will gross $300 million.

Of course, the arrangement is also a little absurd, and the absurdity is worth naming plainly. A government writing a seven-figure check to a 90-year-old New Yorker so he can film a comedy of infidelity among diplomats is the kind of sentence that would get cut from a satire for being too on the nose. But the alternative — the current studio model, in which a $170 million superhero film is considered a normal business decision — makes Madrid's €3 million look like the most disciplined production financing of the season. The city is buying a film shoot. The studios are buying lottery tickets. Only one of them knows it.

Will the film be any good? The honest answer is that Allen's late-period output is a lottery of its own, brilliant one year and inert the next, and no title — bold or cautious — will change that. But the terms of the deal are the story here: a filmmaker, a city, a fixed budget, and a title that waits for the work to justify it. That is a production method. I know which one I'd fund.

Grade: B- — for the proposition. The film gets graded when it exists.

Untitled 51st feature (Woody Allen). ~$14M (€12M). €3M: €1.5M City Council of Madrid + €1.5M Community of Madrid. Not final; expected to include 'Madrid'; chosen after the shoot.

Thursday’s press conference is where the details got interesting, because Allen showed up with company. He was joined by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the Madrid region, and Madrid mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida — which tells you this isn’t just a film shoot, it’s a civic event. When was the last time a mayor and a regional president held a press conference for a $14 million comedy? That’s the industrial-policy part made visible: Madrid isn’t just permitting this production, it’s co-presenting it. The city council’s own justification is refreshingly blunt — the money is a tool to strengthen Madrid’s international profile as a cultural, tourist, and filmmaking destination. No poetry about art. Just tourism math, said out loud.

The terms, for the record, are specific enough to be enforceable, which is rare and admirable. The sponsorship contracts stipulate that Madrid must appear in the film’s title — hence the working designation “Wasp 2026” floating around while Allen decides whether the finished film deserves a bold name or a cautious one — and the city council announced back in December that at least 15 percent of the film’s scenes will be shot in exteriors, with the city “easily recognizable,” showing its cultural, architectural, and historical facets. This is product placement, except the product is a capital city and the placement is the whole movie. Our movies desk is tracking the production as it shoots.

The logistics are substantial for a film this size. Six weeks of principal photography across more than thirty locations in Madrid and Aranjuez — the royal town south of the capital, all gardens and palaces, which tells you something about the visual register Allen is after. Much of the technical crew will be Spanish. The cast is a genuine Allen ensemble in the European mode: Alexi Wasser and Jemima Kirke, who appeared with him at the presentation; Peter Vives; Marton Csokas; Jakob Oftebro. A mix of American independents and European character actors, which is exactly the casting pool Allen has been drawing from since the continent became his primary studio.

Behind the camera, the money has names. The production companies are Wanda Vision — the veteran Spanish outfit, whose producer Miguel Morales was the first to speak at the press conference — Allen’s own New York-based Gravier Productions, and Puerto Rico-based 3SIX9 Studios. WestEnd Films has boarded as the world sales agent, which means somebody has to sell this thing internationally, title TBD and all. And Allen’s base for the shoot is reportedly the Mandarin Oriental Ritz on the Paseo del Prado — a Premier Junior Suite there runs around €3,000 a night, overlooking the Plaza de la Lealtad and the Prado. For a $14 million film, that’s a confident hotel choice. Then again, the man is ninety and on his fifty-first picture. He’s earned the suite.

Allen, at the press conference, gave the quote that should be engraved over every editing room in Europe: “It’s a comedy with a romance, with intrigue, with infidelity and all the ingredients that I always think it is going to make a great story. I think I have all the ingredients for a very good movie, but that remains to be seen. Now comes the hard part. I’ve got to make the movie and put it together, and it has to live up to my expectations.” Asked about politics — there were questions about the protest camp at Puerta del Sol — he declined, saying he’s not a political filmmaker. The ingredients list is doing the talking. For the broader cultural picture this week, our news hub has the rest.

A closing note on the economics, because the contrast is the story. Allen’s last film was 2023’s Coup de Chance. His $68 million four-film deal with Amazon Studios was canceled in 2020, and American distributors have been scarce for him ever since — which is how you end up with a 90-year-old New Yorker making his 51st film on Spanish public money with the word “Madrid” contractually required in the title. Some will call that a comedown. I call it the most honestly financed film of the year: a fixed budget, a city that knows what it’s buying, and a director who grades his own title after the work is done. Grade stands: B- for the proposition. The film gets graded when it exists.