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The reputed $300m production budget is definitely high by industry standards, and raises the stakes and making it more important that SP delivers on the quality front.
Films that do really well with small budgets are always seen as more successful, relatively speaking. Witness GE for instance, that was a massive hit globally compared to the last 2-3 Bond films. That led directly to the big budget/scale for TND, which did not not do quite as well (given its massive budget) compared to GE and so was seen as relatively less successful (both financially and critically).
Sadly, in SP's case, as with TND, TB, or MR, there really was no choice. The predecessor film was such a global smash that they had to go all out financially with the successor. In the eyes of many, those 3 films are also seen as less critically successful than their successful predecessors, despite the higher budgets, and in the case of TB & MR at least, much higher worldwide grosses.
Having said that, yes, it is all speculation at this point. We know nothing for sure until we see the finished product. If history is a guide, it will be seen as not as being as good, critically, as its immediate predecessor, even if it makes more money at the box office.
Only in the short term, and mostly on the Internet IMO.
While this is a franchise that thinks more on the long term.
The LTK/GE gap was mostly caused by Cubby Broccoli protecting his franchise from too cheap TV rights that would have meant Bond could have been everywhere on TV for the last 20 years, while nowadays it's still something the TV channels announce with quite some promotion (it's less and less true I suppose, but this is the idea)
Also, from the leak we also have some internal memos that explain how much BO SP must do in order for Sony to make a profit. Well, it's simply a rule of three from SF's results...
If before, then the amount of money paid by companies to EON for a piece of the SPECTRE action should be subtracted from the total...
Actually, I don't see your answer taking away from the truth of what I wrote. A 900 mill. BO will be judged as "not enough" and hence the film will be viewed as not up to expectations. With a smaller budget, that would be different.
But its not giving away a leak to tell, how much they expect it to do.
Yes I know that quite a few people on the box office fan forums call the "Hobbit", the "Floppit", but I think you put too much weight on them...
They are people who spend 90% of their time making predictions that are off by 20/30 % and yet call themselves experts. And when they are off by 50% or more, then they say the box office is insane. Hmm.. thinking one has the ability to predict these things, and not becoming a super rich industry guru, now this is insane !
No. The $300 million comes from a memo by an MGM executive. He's talking about production budget only. He actually says, at the time the memo was written, they were on pace for the MID-$300 million range. $300 million is a nice, round number.
In the MGM memo about the budget, the executive said the **goal** is to get it down to $250 million **after** all the product placement deals. At the time the memo was written (fall of 2014), deals were still being negotiated. Also, bear in mind, product placement deals don't always mean cash for the production. Instead, some of it amounts to barter (i.e. 007-themed ads by the company doing the product placement) that lowers the marketing cost.
How would you know. How much do they need to get even? 600 something? Question is, how much profit do they want for their risk?
The general formula is take the production budget, multiply by 2.5 to 3 times. That gives you a rough idea what it takes a movie to break even. In the case of SPECTRE, the break even point is in the $800 million to $900 million range (figuring in marketing costs, the fact that not all the ticket sales goes to the studio, etc., etc.).
Put another way, for Skyfall, going past $1 billion was the icing on the cake. For SPECTRE, it may not be a necessity but it's getting close.
Part of what Sony/MGM were pushing for according to the e-mails was to get more money in the top of the gross budget and less in the net.
Yes, the target was $250m net budget with the gross budget over $300m. "The mid 300 millions" was the expression used.
They were concerned that without more money from Mexico, Omega etc the net would end up well over that target.
What I've read indicates that Terence Young restaged the Junkanoo for cameras right after it ended. I try not to think about the earth sequences in MOONRAKER too much so I don't know about that, but the QUANTUM race was shot when it happened, then restaged on a smaller scale with about 1000 extras many months later.
My concern with the 300 mil or whatever is that we haven't been seeing the production value on screen in previous efforts at a slightly lesser price. SKYFALL's limited location work made it feel quite less than globetrotting, so why did IT cost that much? I get that QUANTUM had insane post costs to turn out a finished product in a tiny time frame, so I can see how a lot of that money is kind of thrown out the window at O-T costs, but at least that feels like a real Bond film in terms of variety (even if it is seeing the slums rather than the pyramids and the Eiffel.) I dislike CASINO nearly as much as SKYFALL and don't really see where the money went there either, but don't know anything about its production, just that DAD (for about the same money, I think) for all its many faults at least seemed big, whereas CR did not.
With all the incentives from governments and product placements, it seems like the budget on these things in a net situation would practically put the shows in the black before they even released (sort of like how Joseph Levine had A BRIDGE TOO FAR in profits from pre-sales before it hit screens.) So it seems particularly irresponsible -- or would that be incendiary -- to be spending spending spending, especially when the situation between makers and studio is so ... not great.
It's not like this work is amortized in this fashion. Demand for CGI is enormous, but that is largely due to a rather shortsighted approach to vfx that is often 'delay the decision till post, then throw tons of money and o-t at it.'
It is cheaper now to do marginal work, yeah, because those tools have gone consumer mainstream. But high end works costs insane amounts, which still aren't enough to let the VFX companies survive, because the whole business seems to be about doing 1000+ shots of varying quality instead of a couple hundred that are great that tell the story.
But part of that would be embracing the 'right tool for the right job' aspect, which hasn't been the case for nearly 20 years. Late 90s films that used miniatures and CG in tandem still look a lot better in many cases than the stuff we've gotten this century, probably because they were still thinking things through instead of tossing it all at a guy sitting in front of a monitor. I'm not trying to downplay the artistry of CG -- I used to write for CINEFEX -- but throwing away all your old wrenches because you hear the metric system is 'coming soon' seems silly, and that is kind of what happened here, with a promise that CG is going to be so inexpensive that resulted in A THIRD of the budget on THE MUMMY going to ILM alone - what kind of savings is that?
The problem IMO is that they think CG can do miracles. On a movie I worked on, the director and crew on set decided on their own to use tennis balls on sticks to "help" the CG artists for a CG shot with CG birds they decided to do on the spot out of the blue for a visual gag. Without a CG consultant on the set to help make things a bit smooth and actually usable later ! But hey, it's CG. It can do anything.
On RED PLANET, Digital Domain was originally the main VFX provider. In fact, except for the CG robot done by Cinesite (which is a big hunk of the workload), DD was going to be sole provider for about 250 shots. Director was a first time feature guy, from commercials, who had done stuff with DD before (Clydesdale horse super bowl I think), but he had huge problems on the set with everything (DURING the shoot, one of the leads took out a restraining order against the other, which made two shots and masters impossible ... AND this big-budget show couldn't afford motion-control on the set to shoot the actors separately and comp them together, so all THAT became a post problem too.)
Also, the DP decided to stick a fancy filter in front of the lens even though the mars look was supposed to be done in post, so they had to scan and extract the in-camera mars look before applying the final one.
Oh yeah, and with all this, production appointed an overall vfx supe (the guy who runs VES now, Jeff Okun, very nice guy), and when he arrived in-country, the DD location shoot coordinator wouldn't meet with him and apparently just left the shoot.
Director's cut was late in arriving and as soon as it was turned in (shortly after the film was originally scheduled to release), the whole thing was recut to some kind of cohesive story and VFX were expanded to nearly 1000 shots spread across about 10 vendors, because DD only delivered about two dozen of their contracted shots. (It has been awhile since I thought about this, but I'm pretty sure DD had a weird contract that guaranteed a 10 million buck payout if less than a certain number of their shots were used, some kind of utterly bizarre deal. I should probably look on trekbbs and a few other sites I used to post at to see if I have the full story there.)
DD built a 20 foot ship model, a good one, but most shots in the film are of a CG version, because after DD left the show, nobody could find a place where they could put the camera far enough back from the model to shoot it (???!!!)
Weird stuff.
One of the best accounts anywhere of an utter mess of an effects show is in the limited printing of RETURN TO TOMORROW: THE FILMING OF STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE, which, while it has only limited stuff from the original (axed) vfx house of Robert Abel's, does paint a picture of utter confusion and stupidity that probably caused the film to go double budget (it actually went triple, but a lot of that was surcharges from abandoned earlier attempts to make a trek in the 70s.)
Something John Dykstra once told me about the Abel situation (looking at it in retrospect about 15 years later) was that the guy was trying to do TOY STORY way before there was tech to do it, in the sense he wanted to use the computer to previs everything before it was shot. But as Trumbull pointed out back then, trying to evaluate how well a model will scale and photograph based on a crude wireframe of same is crazy, as the aesthetic considerations would not translate.
People often heard that working on a movie set is boring. Well, it's quite true from my little experience : not much happens between the few minutes were something happen. But this "nothing" is filled with anecdotes about the shooting of other movies between crew members. Sometimes anecdotes turn into urban legends, I guess (you will never read them in your newspaper). Haf of the cast of Asterix at the Olympic Games should have been in jail if half of what I was told was true :)
I really like a couple of seriously warts&all ones from the 70s: MAKING OF EXORCIST 2 is a very honest look at how and why things go wrong that I reread every couple of years, and SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE (about Preminger's ROSEBUD) is hugely informative and entertaining as Hell.
And then there's Kassovitz depiction of how he lost the direction of Babylon AD when the studio brought in their own director. It's available for free on Youtube and seems to have no legal status (it's not to be found on DVDs obviously)
Only one side of the story obviously, but he explains too he made mistakes. It's mostly in French alas for people here (but the very beginning is in English). There's an interesting tidbit about how fight choregraphy is being watered down by Hollywood (only in French alas).
On 34:30 you can hear (in English) a writer discussing he's changing the dialogs because the director wants a different backstory for the hero. There's lots of English dialogs on this video, but I can't list them all, you'll have to deal with the French dialogs to find them. And on 36:40 you have Vin Diesel taking over the movie.
It is just not justifiable how much money QOS, SF and now SP cost.
In any normal production company, the people responsible would have long been sacked.
I wonder why nobody is worried about the exorbitant cost of Spectre. It might well be the most expensive movie ever. And I don't want to know how much BO it has to get to break even let alone make some profit.
In the end EON is running its own franchise into the ground. That might sound very pessimistic but it's a possibility that should not be ignored.
I'm not so sure, the franchise will be alive after BB + MGW are gone.