Steven Soderbergh shot Presence in 11 days, in a single house in Cranford, New Jersey, with the camera standing in for the ghost. The film cost $2 million to make. It took in $11,069,405 worldwide.
The domestic share was $6,900,044, with another $4,169,361 coming from abroad. Divide the worldwide take by the budget and you get roughly $5.53 back for every dollar spent on production. That ignores marketing and exhibitors’ cuts, which the figure never accounts for. Estimates put distribution and advertising at an extra $1 million to $1.6 million.
A house, a camera and no committee
The film follows a family who move into a new home in the suburbs and slowly decide they are not alone. Everything is shown from the point of view of the presence itself. David Koepp wrote the script; Soderbergh directed, and he also did the cinematography and most of the filming, under his usual pseudonym, Peter Andrews.
The idea came from Soderbergh’s own house. He and his wife believed they shared it with a spirit they called Mimi. “It got me thinking about how Mimi would feel about us being in her house,” he said. “Is Mimi pissed at us living here?”
Principal photography ran in September 2023 under an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement granted during the actors’ strike that year. Soderbergh was blunt about what that scale buys a director. “The beauty of projects at this scale is I can just do them without having to talk to anybody.”
The project stayed quiet until December 2023, when it surfaced as part of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival lineup. Callina Liang, Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan lead the cast.
Money versus applause
The budget sits at the micro end of horror. Against it, the grosses look like a clear win: a common rule of thumb says a film needs about twice its production cost to cover marketing and distribution, which would put break-even near $4 million here.
Audiences were less taken. CinemaScore pollsters recorded an average grade of C+. PostTrak found 58 percent of viewers positive overall, and 33 percent said they would definitely recommend it.
