There’s probably an argument to be made that basically no movies should cost that much. The entire top 3 of this year’s box office had budgets in the $100M-$150M range. The thinking between the ballooning budgets is probably that it’s a hit driven industry, so it’s worth spending just $10M more for a tiny bit larger chance of making it a hit. Except it seems to not be true, because movie execs seem to not be good at estimating how much improvement they’re getting for that money and how much the audience will care. A lot of the time it feels like the bigger budgets are just a straight out drawback.
There was an article about Blumhouse years ago, and about how fanatical Jason Blum was about sticking to their tiny budgets. So they give Boy Next Door - the smash hit Jennifer Lopez movie I’m sure you’ve all seen - a budget of $4M. And the director gets it done for that money, but in editing the pivotal scene of J-Lo stabbing the bad boy next door through the eye with an icepick just doesn’t work. It doesn’t look right. So he goes back to Jason Blum asking for just another $200k to reshoot that with a better wax model. Blum turns it down; no matter how pivotal the scene, he is not increasing the budget of the movie by 5% for a two-second shot, the audiences just won’t care enough. (The director got the money for the reshoot from the distributor, and the movie made like 15x its budget.)
I know that nobody (including me!) liked The Creator, but I continue to be amazed that it only cost $80M considering how good it looked. So it’ll come reasonably close to breaking even despite being some of the worst writing in years. If the process is as generalizable as it looks, that could be very helpful for bringing budgets down for a certain kind of movie.
Here’s a crazy number: $86M. Want to guess what that number is before opening the spoiler section?
Ha, I bet you thought that was a budget. No, actually that’s the entire world-wide box office take of the first John Wick. How in the world did such a bomb get three sequels and a spin-off show? By costing only $20M to make. Even by John Wick 3, the budget is still just $75M. That’s pretty wild, because just from a visual perspective I’d totally take those movies over Disney’s greenscreen slop.