The filming of the 10th part of Hell Streets cost 340 million dollars: it is 10 times more expensive than the first part. How did cinema become so expensive? Why is making Hollywood movies so expensive today? Faraou Magazine tried to answer those questions. Not so long ago, a clip of a major blockbuster was privately shown to studio producers. They mostly liked it, but they all agreed that some issues needed to be fixed.
One problem was related to the action scenes. The film was originally planned five years before filming; meanwhile, another studio's blockbuster franchise has gained a lot of popularity, thanks to its large amount of exciting action set pieces. The result? All such sequences in the new film had to be reshot, to match.
Another problem was the mismatch of the story with the current events in the real world, which made the main character far less likable than he would have been half a decade ago, meaning that the script had to be rewritten and all the scenes with him had to be reshot.
The schedule was drawn up, the entire cast was reunited. But there was another problem: the new scenes, many of which were filmed in natural outdoor locations, would be shot during a different season than the original versions. So, they hired a visual effects studio to digitally touch up the leaves in post-production, brush off additional snow, and more. Could the film's directors have instead just waited for the right season to reshoot as planned? Absolutely not: the film's release was barely six months away and, due to the huge future plans for the franchise, there was no way the shooting could be delayed. So there was only one option: to extend the shooting and not pay attention to the additional costs, which cost about an additional third of the estimated budget for the film.
Production costs always jumped
Throughout the history of cinema, there have always been times when production costs skyrocketed: in the last days of the silent film, for example, or during the craze for historical and biblical epics on the big screen in the 50s and early 60s. But the franchise's era, which spans roughly from 2008 to the present day - has seen arguably the wildest and most rampant rise to date. The summer blockbuster revolution was started by the movie "Shark" in 1975. However, the movie "Water World" Kevin Costner set a new record with a budget of $172 million as the most expensive in history. Today, it would not even enter the top 100 most expensive.
This Sunday, the tenth part of Hell Streets will be released, which cost 340 million dollars, which is almost 10 times more than the cost of the first part. A month later, the film Indiana Jones and the Artifact of Destiny arrived, worth 300 million dollars, which is more expensive than the first four parts of the film combined. Then there's Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One ($290 million) and The Flash ($220 million), followed by December's Avatar: The Last Airbender ($350 to $460 million , depends on who you ask).
True, most of them can't match the $410 million budget for 2011's Pirates of the Caribbean 447 or the astronomical $2015 million spent on 325's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which remains the most expensive. movie ever (There is still confusion over the cost of the two most recent Avengers films, 'Infinity War' and 'Endgame', which officially cost $356 and $1,2 million, respectively, but later figures show that the total budget spent on both films is closer to XNUMX .XNUMX billion dollars.)
Of course, it is still too early to accurately calculate and publish these figures, as it is possible that other new costs will be revealed in the financial statements in the coming years. Even if they remain true until the end of this summer, the previous 12 months will have seen four of the 10 most expensive movies ever made.
TV dramas have budgets similar to movies
The current spike in costs isn't just about movies. Individual top TV dramas now regularly have film budgets. Amazon has spent $50 million per episode on the new series “Citadel,” none of which has yet exceeded 40 minutes in length.
Corona increased the budget
What's happening now? In this post-covid era, new imaging protocols (testing, isolation, different virus protection equipment, etc.) have added between five and six and a half percent to the cost of any major shoot. That percentage is much higher in the film 'Mission: Impossible', because 18 months of shooting were spent in the midst of the corona in Europe, and these are incredible costs. But costs had already started to rise before the pandemic. Many producers and visual effects directors associate it with the “business model of the world of cinema”: the various series of interconnected films that the industry has become obsessed with.
Everything usually revolves around already existing "brands", such as "Star Wars", "Harry Potter", Marvel's and DC's superheroes, and their reliance on digital spectacle has the most obvious factor that shows the increase in the cost of films. The royalties of the stars of the "Star Wars" films are between 15 and 20 percent of the budget of the film itself, and the salary of the director and producer is still the same (although it is often agreed that the salary increases in relation to the future profit from the film).
Movies with visual effects attract viewers
However, visual effects now regularly cost about as much as those sums combined (more than a third of a film's entire budget), eclipsing even the costs of the physical filming itself. As for the writers, scriptwriting usually costs about five percent of the budget, at most. While the first part of the movie "Jurassic Park" from 1993 had 63 shots with computer graphics, last year's "Jurassic World: Domination" had 1450 - about 10 graphic inserts per minute.
However, expensive as they are, films with a lot of audiovisual effects still have a good commercial contribution because they attract more viewers. Regardless of age, gender, nationality, culture, or cognitive function, anyone can watch, say, “Morbius,” and have more or less the same experience.
Spider man with Jared Leto in the lead role received terrible reviews and a low rating last year, which tells us that the audience agreed with the critics. It also bombed twice at the US box office, as Sony decided to release it a second time in the States after the first failed, inspiring a ton of tongue-in-cheek mimes from audiences. However, he found greater success in the international arena.
For the same reason that they appeal to a global audience, serial films based on already known pop-culture properties are also by far the most likely to provide their creators with multiple earning opportunities, greater profits. So while making only five expensive films a year may be riskier than making 30 with reasonable budgets, it still has six times the chance of success.
The income from movies is so big now, so it's not a big deal even if some movies flop. Such was the case with Disney's 'John Carter and The Lone Ranger' in 2010, when the earnings from the studio's other blockbusters outweighed the losses.
And a good team has to be paid
Changes in the labor market are another influential factor: again, covid is partly, but not entirely, responsible for this. Over the past five years, the number of crew members has grown significantly - especially in Great Britain, which has become a center for major Hollywood productions. More movies and television series are filmed here than ever, and to have the best technicians and craftsmen, you have to pay them well to come.
The same goes for the cast, of course. Recently, it is often said that Hollywood has a hard time unearthing new movie stars, but in its entire existence, it has already created a large amount of funny and beautiful actors and actresses who have gained a huge amount of followers on the Internet. The more of them you can cram into one movie, the more likely you are to attract a bunch of their followers to be interested in the movie.
The movie Dune Denis Villeneuve is a perfect example: gloomy science fiction, with visual effects that sometimes border on the abstract, starring prominent actors such as Timothy Chalamet, zendaya i Oskar Isak, Florence Pugh i Austin Butler... Unlike famous actors who would have played such roles well two decades ago, these stars sell tickets. That's why they are so sought after in the industry. Again, the cost of securing them, and the cost of the inevitable reshoots due to their busy schedules, keeps rising.
Repetitions the biggest problem
And so we return to the nightmare we started with: the problem of frequent reshoots. Once upon a time, the cast and crew would go on location, and the studio would have to make do with the footage they did. But modern production techniques allow a lot of this to be done afterwards. For example, when an American production is set in the UK, the directors in Los Angeles watch the footage every day overnight and have their own list of requests for the director, which he receives in the mail before he even wakes up.
Moreover, the nature of the cinematic world requires individual release dates to be set years in advance, meaning that films are often rushed into production before the script is fully developed, the characters are fleshed out and the plots are clear. There's often a lot of ambiguity that creeps in: neither the director nor the studio really knows what the film will look like until they sit down and watch the first rough. The process of reshooting is described as a way of “bringing clarity” to a project: in other words, it's only when you see what you have that you realize what you still need to perfect it.
The problem is that this process sometimes takes a long time until everything is resolved. One of the reasons why today's incredibly expensive films often end up looking a bit cheap is that some of the material deemed necessary for the final cut was rushed together at the last minute: remember, the release date of a franchise film can rarely be pushed back, thanks to various sequels and the spin-offs that are already behind it. One recent superhero movie hit theaters with around 600 visual effects shots still unfinished: various effects houses had to keep adding them to the overall film even after its release in order to complete it in time for launch on the domestic stage.
Sometimes even movies that haven't been made yet can cause chaos. Back in the spring of 2022, a near-complete version of the upcoming superhero adventure The Flash was shown to executives and test audiences, who were apparently very impressed. But after a change of directors at DC in November, the film had to be quickly reworked to serve as a bridge between the films made under the old and new management. For now, this chaos seems to be sustainable and will continue to be so as long as the audience accepts it. As one franchise declines, another rises, and the cinematic multiverse endures.
It's a perfect business model where a lot of money can be made, and a uniquely disrupted model for trying to produce quality art.
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