Economy and Budgets

With every good or bad movie there always comes a "price to pay." In most cases the price is the expensive budget that the film uses to be made. The budget of a film differs greatly depending on if it is a comedy film or a drama or even a superhero/action film. If anyone has ever been near a set when the filming process happened they would most likely comment on how many people are present on the set between all the different extra's and cameraman all those people influence a budget.

In recent years, driven by the success, film budgets have shot up in price. I remember when I was on the internet and watching the promotion for the film "Evan Almighty" they labeled it as the most expensive comedy film ever made with costs (including marketing and advertising) exceeding over 200 million dollars. To me that is a ridiculous number. The film only made about 170 million so by standard of the industry that was seen as a flop. The truth is most comedy films budgets are now in the 30 millions between the salaries and the cost of advertising films have definitely escalated. Sometimes a small budget is a good thing for a film. It gives the film more room for growth. Say a film is made for 10 million dollars and it grosses 40 million dollars then that is considered a success because it grossed 4 times its budget. The higher the budget the higher the pressure on the movie.

I realize that it is very hard to continue making films like "Juno" which was considered a low budget successful comedy film that was made for around 6 mill. and grossed almost 230 million world-wide. Even though the economy appears to be down, the film industry is certainly far from it. Last weekend "Fast and Furious" earned over 70 million dollar its opening weekend, the weekend before, "Monsters vs. Aliens" earned almost 60 million dollars its opening weekend etc. We really don't have a reason to return to low budget economy if the films are still making money. One of the factors that raises a budget is the salary of an actor. It is not unusual anymore for actors to earn about 20 million a film plus a share of the profits. But, if they are the reason why all these people are going to the movies in the first place, maybe they deserve the money they earn.

I always thought the film industry was very similar to real estate. A company places an investment (In this case on a film) and they wait till the (film) outdoes the amount of money they placed into it. Like real estate, in the film industry, there is sometimes what is called a "bad investment", normally this is a case like "Evan Almighty" when the film fails to surpass its budget. But, luckily with the amount of bad investments comes a lot of good investments. It will be interesting to observe what the budgets of a film are like in 10 years from now.

Check out this list on wiki. on expensive film budgets.

List

James Cameron new film "Avatar" is said to have a 300 million dollar budget which some people say may surpass "Pirates of The Caribbean" as the most expensive film ever made. The film is a 3-D Science Fiction film and scheduled for a release of, December 18, 2009.

-Bwebs