Runaway Production Watch

Remember how it took the new Gore Verbinski "Lone Ranger" so long to get a greenlight from Disney because of worries over how much the movie was going to cost? Well, according to The Hollywood Reporter, those fears turned out to be prescient. "The Lone Ranger" has gone over the agreed upon reduced budget, is weeks behind in filming, and has all the earmarks of a runaway production. Meanwhile, over at Paramount, the Brad Pitt zombie film "World War Z" is also in trouble. The film was delayed from December to next summer a while ago, but it only came out recently that "World War Z" will need weeks of reshoots and its whole third act rewritten. This is not expected to help its ballooning budget numbers either.

I've touched on this issue in a couple of other posts before, but never really addressed it head-on. The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that the big tentpole Hollywood movies of recent years have gotten crazy expensive as they've grown more reliant on costly CGI effects. Even when you adjust for inflation, recent Hollywood blockbusters dominate the lists of the most expensive films of all time, with the third "Pirates of the Caribbean" topping them all with an estimated budget of $300 million. The highest number anyone will confirm is the $258 million that "Spider-man 3" cost. Of course, most of these big blockbusters have made their money back. The last three "Pirates" movies are among the Top 20 highest worldwide grossing films of all time. Despite being disdained by the fanboys, "Spider-man 3" made over $330 million domestically, and nearly $900 million worldwide. The massive budgets look perfectly reasonable when the returns are equally as huge. Well, except when they're not.

Financial analysts have warned for years that box office receipts are not keeping up with Hollywood's blockbuster budgets. We're now seeing $200 million write-offs for costly flops like "John Carter" and "Battleship" as audience enthusiasm for these movies has waned. We may finally be seeing the upper limit of what the studios are willing to spend in pursuit of box office bonanzas as the size of these financial risks are finally catching up. We're a long way from the failure of a single one of these pictures potentially threatening the fortunes of a major studio, like "Cleopatra" famously gutted Twentieth Century Fox back in the 60s, but losses this size are nothing to sneeze at. "John Carter" led to the ousting of Disney Studio Chairman Rich Ross, and last years disastrous "Mars Needs Moms," which made less than $40 million worldwide on a $150 million budget, pretty much killed the feature animation operations of ImageMovers Digital.

Reading over the recent reports about "The Lone Ranger" and "World War Z," what strikes me is how small the margin of error is now for these massive productions. If there are any setbacks at all, like the weaponry being seized from "World War Z," or the weather delays on "Lone Ranger," the costs can add up very quickly. When I think of runaway productions, I tend to think of Francis Ford Coppola tromping about in the jungle, beset by all kinds of disasters, while trying to make Apocalypse Now." Or how Stanley Kubrick's demanding perfectionism dragged out principal photography on "The Shining" for over a year. But if you adjust for inflation, "Apocalypse Now" would have only cost $110 million," and "The Shining" only half that much today. For all the blame heaped on Andrew Stanton for letting costs balloon on "John Carter," nothing I've read suggests he was ever remotely as self-indulgent or out of control. But these days, with these kinds of movies, a few reshoots can break the bank, and there's no room for mistakes.

It makes me all the more appreciative of genre directors who do know how to handle big budgets, like Joss Whedon pulling off the monumental juggling act of "The Avengers," and Christopher Nolan somehow giving "Inception" a brain, along with all the pretty visuals. I don't think Coppola or Kubrick could operate under the same constraints, honestly. Some of our filmmaking luminaries like Spielberg and Scorsese have managed to adapt very well, though it's telling that Scorsese's celebrated "Hugo" ran far over budget, and was a pretty hefty loss for Paramount. And then there's James Cameron, who some say really started the whole ballooning budget mess, when "Titanic" ran up a $200 million bill in 1997, an unheard of sum at the time. Everyone expected it to bomb, but it ended up making $600 million domestically, breaking every box office record in the books, and prodding studios to start forking over ever-larger sums of cash for their blockbusters.

Now $200 million movies are commonplace, but the risks are still as huge as ever. By next summer, who knows how high the budgets for "The Lone Ranger" and "World War Z" will have climbed. And with all this financial pressure, and the directors more creatively constrained than ever, and the audience getting restless, I suspect that one way or another, we're going to see some great drama at the box office.
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