Treat: Keira Knightley plays the Sugar Plum Fairy

Media giant Disney has sprinkled cinematic cheer ahead of the Budget tomorrow with news it spent more than £85 million in Britain filming festive fairytale The Nutcracker And The Four Realms.

The movie, which has its premiere on Friday, is a surreal take on the 19th Century book that inspired Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet.

It features 17-year-old American actress Mackenzie Foy as a young girl who finds a key to a parallel universe inhabited by gingerbread soldiers and an army of mice. Keira Knightley and Dame Helen Mirren also star.

Accounts for the two years to January show Nutcracker – filmed at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire and made by Mistletoe Pictures, an offshoot of Disney – had total costs of £103.8 million, with around £85.6 million spent in Britain.

Spending on staff was £10.3 million, a figure not including payments to film freelancers.

According to the British Film Institute filmmakers spent £1.9 billion producing movies in Britain last year – a 23 per cent increase on 2016. Of that, £1.7 billion came from foreign firms.