Movie Budgets

Does anybody else think that movie budgets are getting out of hand? Too many movies are coming out with 150 Million dollar budgets and struggle to make to make the 100 million dollar mark, Master & Commander for instance, that cost 150 million and I would think that its pretty clear that although it would be a great movie that it does not have a very wide appeal. Looney Toones back in Action cost 120 million, T3 was 150 Million, each Matrix sequel was 150 million and Cat in the Hat 130 Mill, all of which dont appear to be amazing movies (T3 was cool though but not deserving of a 150 mill budget). Most of these huge budget movies end up being pretty eye candy whilst Plot and Script take a back seat. In the end low budget films which are forced to rely more on Script etc end up out being more entertaining and half the time out performing these huge budget movies, School of Rock and Elf for instance. Well Im done, I have not argued my point very well cause Im too tired but does anyone else see what Im getting at?

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I think you said it well enough, and a lot of members here will agree with you.

I'll take a hundred In The Bedroom's for a single crappy T3 anyday.

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Absolutely, it's going to take another Heaven's Gate disaster before Hollywood figures it out.

I'm going to take the road less traveled by and disagree. And best of all, I'm going to do it with my aggravating point-by-point multi-quote breakdown style.

f it happens often enough, less people will risk such large sums of money. The market will always reach a reasonable equilibrium. Movie budgets have gone up because there's more money to be made than there used to be.


Not exactly relevant, but where did you hear that Looney Tunes: Back in Action cost $120 million?


I don't see what you mean by this. It sounds like you're saying budgets should be assigned based on how cool the film is. In reality, slice that budget by, say, $50 million, and maybe you wouldn't have deemed it cool in the first place.


I cannot honestly say that I do. What harm do these movies do? You say the superior films fairly often win out in the end, and I'd say you're generally right. Mainstream cinema is just a higher stakes game than it used to be.

Maybe all these movies aren't artistically brilliant, but they do serve a purpose. To entertain the mass audiences for a couple hours. And many people don't enjoy "intelligent" movies such as Master and Commander because they really don't care about the characters in the story they're watching, they just want to go and sit and have a good time to take their minds off of their life for a little while. I'm glad they spent $150 million to make T3 because then we wouldn't even have had anything cool to look at. It's these budgets and the massive numbers of people working on them which make otherwise completely useless, dull, and even stupid movies somewhat entertaining. T3 may not have had a good story, or an original one, but the action was pretty damn cool, and the budget definitely showed through there.

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All I know is that I'm on a budget and hardly go to the theater at all. WHen I do, it's because I feel I should see these big budget, special effects, monsters on the big screen and big sound arena. Yet, I'm almost always disappointed with what I see. The only movies like this that I've been happy with are the Lord of the Rings movies. For me, The Matrix movies and Terminator 3 all sucked the big green donkey dicks, though I did like X2. The smaller budget and Indy fims I leave for DVD and find that I routinely like them.

I had forgotten I posted this topic, I return only to find it shat all over by Yoda

Well I think that figure includes Advertising, I may also have added a few million for effect...

In the end all im saying is that big budgeted movies are for one in many cases underserving of $100 budgets and generally are average movies that rely on their budgets to make the movie. Whereas movies like Equilibrium which are forced more to rely on creativity are generally the more superior movie.

Yikes. "For effect"?

Seriously, when you quote numbers like that, it can be kind of misleading if you're exaggerrating them to make your point.
And by "misleading," I mean "******* f*cking abhorrent".

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I heard that the budget for spider-man 2 was £230 mil... its just like football players... goes up and up!

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i think to produce a quality blockbuster movie these days. there has to be a budget that high. it leads to a better product i think.

Maybe, then again... in the long run we have to assess inflation, and maybe even the current privacy issues over the internet... if it gets too extreme it can possibily go downhill as more and more people stop buying DVDs.

For me, the connection is too slow, but I admit if I had the connection speeds I would consider ... I freely admit to downloading well over 500 songs on the internet though. It would be interesting to see where this leads.

yes I think thats the general public consensus... I guess it provides more lee-way in the scene they can shoot or can't shoot or at least make it more spectacular. I for one agree with you

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And like that .... he's gone

Apparently the cost to make a movie averages at about 100 million $, 40% of which go towards marketing the film.

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