84.000 dollars . . .
. . . was the amount of money, left by Catharine. It seems to me it wasn't that much to save a zoo from bankruptcy.
==================================
What if this is as good as it gets?
I checked the economies of the underlying real story from Dartmoor and there the initial outlay was GBP 1.1 million, and the ZOO cost about half a million annually to run. They needed 1000 visitors per day to break even. The real Benjamin Mee also sold the rights to the book on which the film is made. A rat infestation apparently cost him GBP 9000 alone. So I did not catch the details in the film, but hopefully the writers would have been aware of the actual costs and incorporated those somehow.
shareI recently read the book, which was lovely, and the finances were something like this: Mee's mum sold her house and her five children pooled their resources, and together they had a bit over a million pounds to invest. They borrowed another half million pounds, and used the combined funds to buy the zoo and bring it up to modern standards. They were running low on funds and trying to borrow more when the zoo opened, and money finally began to come in. Things were a bit dicey at the end of the first fiscal year, but then the BBC show began to air, and business picked up during the winter. Mee still runs the zoo, so I presume they've made a financial go of it.
Mee was very clever, he realized very early on that in the age of the stunt memoir and reality TV show, the best way to advertise his zoo would be to sell the family's story - to TV, book publishers, and a movie studio, as it turned out. They ought to talk about him in business schools.
“Seventy-seven courses and a regicide, never a wedding like it!