It seems more like $0 to make the movie and $26k for distribution. Do traditional movies count distribution costs in their budgets? Hollywood accounting is weird....
They paid to rent the cinema (small fee), then "sold" themselves the tickets. So their expenditure might have been $26k, but their income would have been $26k. In reality, I assume no money changed hands. It's almost more fun to imagine they sold each other one ticket at time handing the same ten dollars back and forth between themselves.
They held 5 viewings, making roughly $5k per viewing.
"Four-walling is when distributors rent out a movie theatre and buy all the seats," Mr Tabach, who used to work at BuzzFeed making viral videos, explained.
"So they pay a flat fee to the theatre, and any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets. The moment we realised that was an option of distribution, we went for it."
They pay the fee to the theater, but as the distributor of the film they then get that money, or some large percentage of it.
Sounds to me like they're renting the theater, so they can then sell tickets they way they want. So they "sell" the tickets to themselves. They pay rent, then the ticket sales are a wash, but can be reported as "ticket sales."
Even if they did buy the tickets, they paid themselves with those tickets.
They paid a small fee for four walling (which they probably got for a token amount because of COVID and the fact that one of the guys might know the owner since he worked there). And that was pretty much it as far as actual costs were concerned.
Generally the listed budget for a movie is the production budget, which does not include marketing the film. Generally for a big "blockbuster" style movie, you can generally assume the marketing budget is almost equal to the production budget.
According to the TV news this morning, yes, they did buy all of the tickets themselves.
Which kinda makes the "$0 Budget" headline a little iffy. $0 to make the film. But $26k to achieve their goal.