It’s hardly a secret that making all but the tiniest movies is extremely expensive, because when you’re bringing potentially hundreds of cast and crew members together for weeks, even months on end, the costs quickly add up.
All the same, most movies are made within sensible financial parameters that ensure they’re able to turn a profit, as long as everything goes according to plan of course.
Yet “according to plan” is easier said than done, and in the case of these 10 movies, their budgets grew far beyond the control of just about everyone involved.
These movies all ended up costing orders of magnitude more than anyone could’ve ever anticipated, in turn widening their financial exposure and making it increasingly difficult for them to actually turn a profit theatrically.
The reasons for these stonking budgets are absolutely wild, from studios ill-advisedly giving rock star filmmakers a blank check, to global economic issues, and even shoots so thoroughly cursed it seemed like somebody, somewhere actively didn’t want them to happen.
Whether the movie turned out great or not, and no matter how they performed commercially, these movies all had outrageously overinflated budgets…
It’s often said not to work with animals or children in Hollywood, but as Steven Spielberg learned while shooting Jaws, shooting on the open ocean with a waterlogged mechanical shark ain’t no picnic either.
Spielberg’s ground-breaking blockbuster was given a $3.5 million budget with a 55-day shooting schedule, but by the time the masterful thriller was finally in the can, it’d been filming for 159 days.
This left the shoot running three-and-a-half months (!) over schedule, while causing the budget to balloon to $9 million – hardly chump change in 1975.
As the first major movie to be shot on the ocean, nobody was prepared for quite how treacherous it would be, with Spielberg himself even admitting that he was “naive about the ocean.”
Shooting at sea caused camera equipment to get water damaged, unwanted boats to sail into frame, crew members to get seasick, and worst of all the mechanical sharks to regularly break down due to their salt water intake. This all contributed to Spielberg being able to shoot just a few hours per 12-hour filming day.
Once filming wrapped, Spielberg assumed his career was over, given that no filmmaker had taken a film so far over-schedule before.
But of course, Jaws went on to smash box office records, becoming the highest-grossing film ever at the time and vindicating what was nevertheless an utterly roughshod production.
This post was originally published on here
