April
23
Spidey 3 Busts Budget Record
For years now the studios have effectively gotten away with betting the farm on their in-house sequel tentpoles. This summer will prove a crucible for that strategy. Which ones will go down in flames? The whole idea of a tentpole is to pay your other bills with its profits---not to barely break even. The costs on Spidey are astronomical. Variety's Diane Garrett and Radar's Kim Masters look at the numbers.
Variety: For Sony's webslinger franchise, a huge sum like the admitted $258 million may be pricey, but it's considered more investment than risk, since the first two films took home $1.6 billion in box office alone, before DVD, ancillaries and merchandising were added in. But some skeptical studio rivals say "Spider-Man 3" has actually topped the $300 million budget mark. The whole guessing game provides a timely reminder of the other rules of talking about tentpole budgets:1) Take all figures with skepticism. No matter what a studio avows, rivals say the real budget is at least one-third higher than the reported one.
2) Time heals everything. Last year, Bryan Singer said on TV that "Superman Returns" cost $250 million. The studio and the director immediately said, no, it's under $200 million. Now that all the returns are in and it's made a profit, they're more open to acknowledging the high figure.
3) Keep it all in perspective. Back in the 1950s, nobody talked publicly about budgets because most outsiders didn't care. But when TV threatened to erode filmgoing, studios actually exaggerated the costs of movies: "Filmed with a cast of thousands! At a cost of millions!"
4) Only the accountants know for sure. With Hollywood's famously pliable bookkeeping, studio accountants can easily make a budget come out higher -- or lower -- than the real tab, depending on the studio's needs.
This summer, "Spider-Man 3" isn't the only tentpole pushing the budget envelope. The latest installments in the "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "Rush Hour" and "Die Hard" franchises, as well as "Evan Almighty" and "Transformers," are all drawing scrutiny.
Universal is already weary of defending its $175 million budget for "Evan Almighty," which some consider too high for a comedy. The studio counters that the "Bruce Almighty" sequel is designed as a four-quadrant film, and therefore poised for bigger B.O. returns than typical comedies.
New Line's assertion that the "Rush Hour 3" budget is $125 million seems suspiciously last decade -- especially after factoring in the cost of reuniting stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, with director Brett Ratner six years after the series' previous installment.
The meter is still running for "Pirates of the Caribbean 3," which has been bedeviled by costly overruns and last-minute f/x work leading up its May 25 bow. Pic's actual tally is hard to compute given the overlap between the second and third installments in the franchise, but before the overruns, the budget for both sequels was already closing in on $500 million.
Radar:
Even before filming began in January 2006, Sam Raimi promised to pull out all the stops for his third Spidey film (likely the last he'll direct in the series). He wasn't kidding. As production dragged on into late summer—it had been scheduled to conclude in June—stories about the project's ballooning budget started popping up all over town. But in the end, even the most hyperbolic of observers may have underestimated the final tab. Industry insiders claim that Sony spent $350 million or more on production alone. With marketing and promotion factored in, the total price tag will approach half a billion dollars—positioning Spider-Man 3 as the most expensive movie of all time. (Cleopatra, the 1963 epic that has long held the title of priciest picture, had an inflation-adjusted budget of $290 million.)Still reeling from a flurry of bad press on its PlayStation 3 gaming console, Sony isn't eager to claim this honor. A studio spokesman angrily rejects the $350 million estimate as a "complete fabrication," insisting that production costs didn't exceed $270 million. One of the film's producers, Laura Ziskin, also disputes the higher total, albeit in a less forceful manner. "I refuse to say the [real] number because it makes me choke," she tells Radar. "Spider-Man 3 was a super-expensive movie—the most expensive film we've ever made. But there's no way you can get to $300 million."
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No matter how much it costs, I can't see it being as big a risk as the $90 million spent on "Town and Country" (and that's only the revealed cost).
That only made $6.71 domestic box office and was a huge flop.
Regardless of costs, Spider-Man 3 will likely not be a flop and the more they spend on the film, the less they have to pass on to Marvel. Add to this the possibility of many of the "post" costs being paid to Sony (Sony Pictures Image Works) and the soundtrack distributed through Sony, and the amount of investment returning/staying with Sony remains worthwhile. It's Marvel and anyone with points who need to worry about the actual boxoffice profitability.
Posted by: Christian Johnson | April 23, 2007 at 05:32 PM
My favorite comment about so-called inflated budgets was Steven Speilberg's on "1941:"
"The important question is not whether a movie is worth $20 million but whether it's worth $10.00."
Posted by: David C | April 25, 2007 at 01:15 PM