Why Movies Are So Expensive (And How To Fix It)

I'm entirely convinced that movie budgets are ridiculous because someone is laundering money through them

Oppenheimer involved real set construction and hired some of the most well-paid actors in Hollywood, and still came to a budget of 100mil. Matt Damon & RDJ said in interviews: he (Nolan) hates wasting money. So you get a sh*tty accommodation and no chairs on set but you don't care because every cent gets poured into the production. And if you're not working on the set, you're not allowed on'. The fact that a lot of them mentioned that multiple times goes to show how normal the waste of cash must be on other sets.

I once watched Desperados, dubbed with Tarantinos and Rodriguez comment. Tarantino said something that I have not forgotten in 20 years: "The good thing about having no money is - you needa become creative"

One of the problems with CGI is all of these big movies now are written by committee and they always undergo changes based on focus group testing and market research, even during filming. This causes CGI artists to constantly rework everything they do. Not only does this waste money, it prevents the CGI artists from polishing anything, so the movies cost more and end up looking worse.

400M movies and it they still look like crap.

"The first woman to discover fire." That line had me on the floor.

The thing with CGI is that a film like Master and Commander had CGI in it, but it was used subtly to iron out issues, add in context and complete elements like bits of ship or gun fire. When you have to make an entire sequence out of CG, or model an entire character, or cannot be bothered to go out and reconnoitre a location, then something is wrong with your movie.

I am not sure that Hollywood is any different than other businesses today. I am in medicine and there was a study that came out in 2012 that showed how many physicians were in a hospital compared to administrators over the years. In the 50s, for every physician in a hospital, they had 2 administrators. Now, for every physician in my hospital, we have over 400 administrative people. And people wonder why healthcare is so expensive. Lots of mouths to feed.

Accounting for inflation, $55M is about the budget of the first Star Wars film. Someone paid Dwayne Johnson a Star Wars film to be in a forgettable one.

Reminder that Star Wars was made in 1977 for $11 Million ($55 Million in today's money), I think the most famous actor there was Peter Cushing, it pioneered new practical effects technology and set off an entire subgenre of sci-fi. Solo cost something like $300 Million, and I'm pretty sure everyone has forgotten it exists. High budgets do not make movies great. Visionary directors do.

A good example of budget concerning informing script decisions is Back to the Future. The original script involved a nuclear explosion providing the energy needed to get back to the present time, but they realized that would be too expensive to shoot an instead tried to come up with an ending they could shoot on a set they alread had. That led to the clocktower idea which turned out to be brilliant and probably a lot better than the ending they would have shot on a higher budget. Limitations breed creativity, at least in some cases...

The problem is the industry has zero self awareness and they have shifted the blame to the last place left; the audience. They will go down in flames never accepting that they are the ones setting the fires. The last few years have yielded the fewest movies that I want to see and none that I want to own. The industry is killing itself.

Hey drinker vfx artist and editor here You are spot on in most aspects but cgi and vfx, especially where I come from and projects I work on are very different to what you said. vfx and cgi artists don't get to choose what price we want, it's actually based off of commission and how low you're willing to do the job for. That's right vfx no matter the production boils down to how cheap can the most important part of the film be done. An excellent example of this would be the flash movie where the speed force scenes were actually done in one week... because that was all the time they had to work on it due to poor planning from the producers and directors. Vfx artists do not have the luxuries granted to us like writers, actors, or directors. No unions or protections are in place. This is why many production houses actually go out of business due to needing to finish one project and making massive changes on the flip of a dime with no compensation or residuals. This as you can imagine leads to bad CGI or effects. A great example is "Life of Pi" it won the academy award for best vfx... but the whole studio was shuttered before that because of that movies demands. In the vfx world I have to say that there is an extreme disconnect between the directors and producers where they seem to think that everything can be fixed in post production. This is some not all mind you. So in their eyes a messed up shot , dirt on the camera, or missing actor... can just be easily edited in/out because its simple right? That's not the case, and it's very time consuming and depending on the shot... and even then some things can't be salvaged without a re-shoot. ideally we need to be more involved with the teams and production on site. forge a contract and let us be on set and ask us how to plan certain shoots so we can achieve what the client wants. this current process of just filming a movie and sending it to a vfx house without insight on the production needs to stop. especially when you have 30 or more studios working on one film doing several other elements. it's a broken system and it's starting to really show. I hope you enjoyed the comment and I'll go away now....

I recall Katee Sackoff saying at one point that she felt like the catering budget alone for Mandalorian cost more than a whole season of Battlestar Galactica.

As an animation/VFX artist working in Eastern Asia, I want to add a point to this already well analyzed video. The reason why the VFX here is cheaper is simple: we are paid way less. If you see reports writing about Hollywood VFX houses being sweat factories. here it is barely above low-end servers worker pay. People here usually see these works as stairs to jump to those Hollywood sweat factories for a much better life. (And ironically, that just makes the situation in Hollywood worse.) I just hope those production companies don’t take the wrong lesson from Gazilla -1 and make the wage in those VFX studios to the same level as those in Eastern Asia.

tom cruise... i went to see MI6 and top gun only to see tom cruise own the screen. ho boy i rewatched all 3 LOtR movies on the weekend and boy... i had tears in my eyes all the time.... asking myself, where did all the talent go these days? how can something so spectacular exist and fail to inspire the younger generations to same greatness...

I remember an interview with Bruce Campbell, probably 10-15 years ago, where he said (paraphrasing): "A Hollywood movie costs 250-million dollars now. I could make 20 movies with that much money. Out of those, maybe 10 will be watchable... and 2 will actually be good. So that's 2 GOOD movies for that much money." And if we let artists and professionals make movies again, it could be a lot more than 2.

Godzilla:Minus One is a testament to the unmatched power of less is more

"I think that when you push the budgets into the stratosphere, it makes it that much easier to steal." - Billy West, on why voice actors were replaced by celebrities in animated movies My last job in Hollywood was just after 9/11 and it was a temp-like job. I was asked with another PA to drive a passenger van full of documents from the Sony lot in Culver City to a nondescript house in a residential neighborhood; no signs, no indications--if we hadn't been given the address we never would've noticed it. Even in a 12' passenger van with no seats, it took 2 trips. The house was like the TARDIS: it was a lot bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside (1 long sprawling storey) and every room was an office with stacks and stacks and stacks of banker's boxes and people at desks typing data into terminals. So this was a "counting house" where paper documents on budgets were compiled into electronic files. I remember thinking that there was no feasible way on God's Green Earth that a proper audit of all these documents could be done accurately because you were looking at 1M+ pages per project, and that was just what we brought for ours--no telling how many trips like ours per movie got done in total. I've never forgotten that experience because of how mundane and suspicious it all was.

I think bad writing is the biggest problem. Titanic was absurdly expensive at the time and was full of big name actors, but was a great film because it had a compelling story as well as (for the time) amazing special effects. I don't know why writing is so bad. I think it might be because studios don't start with a script and build the movie from that; they start with an idea of remaking some old film or going to the well yet another time to some existing franchise, chuck a lot of money at it and then expect the creative types to come up with something in a very limited time frame, the script being very much an after thought