The Wall Street Journal breaks down which movies will top 200 million +

Craziness! With the type of money being pumped into movies now, they could seriously re-charge a small country.

Here it is, from Darkhorizons.com, a breakdown of how much the big time movies are reportedly costing:

A Breakdown of $200+ Million Budgets
Posted: Monday May 15th, 2006 6:16pm
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Author: Garth Franklin

One of the most difficult things to ween out of any filmmaker or studio is a film’s budget. More often than not they generally underestimate the amount by a good 20-30%, and of course it almost always never includes development costs or marketing/publicity expenses – an amount which can be as high as the film itself.

This past weekend though, The Wall Street Journal surprised everyone with a breakdown of some Summer movie budgets for the newest club on the block, the $200+ million epic. Amongst their estimates:

“Spider-Man 3” – $250-$300 million
“Superman Returns” – $261 million
“King Kong” – $250 million
“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” – approaching $225 million
“X-Men: The Last Stand” – $210 million

How they got the numbers remains unsure but for the most part they do seem rather spot on with the word through the grapevine rather than the on the record statements.

Officially X3 cost $165m, Kong cost $207m, and Superman has drawn conflicting amounts ranging from $190m to $250m. In Superman’s case its not sure whether that amount includes the $45-65 million in development costs accumulated over nearly ten years before Bryan Singer came onboard.

Also, Spider-Man 3 is still shooting so there’s no telling how much higher it will go, whilst Pirates is being worked on to the last minute and may climb further. Pirates will be balanced though with the third film which will obviously re-use much of the elements from the second one and save on costs – by how much though is uncertain.

Amazing how much money gets pumped into these movies. It was a crime when Waterworld was getting up north near the 200 zone and it was outragous when Titanic went over the 200 mark (but at least they got back everything) but now these movies are being pumped out for close to 300 million. Hope people start going to see movies now.

–Socram

8 thoughts on “The Wall Street Journal breaks down which movies will top 200 million +

  1. flammable says:

    Well, with movie studios screaming about losses, it’s hard to feel like they’re hurting when they’re putting out $300 million dollar movies.

    My god, you could feed a small country with some of that money. Is Superman Returns (a.k.a. Lois and Clark, the movie) worth all of that?

    Well, Spidey 3 is, dammit! LOL

  2. socramforever says:

    haha! yeah, well, he should have made X3 instead of Returns, then maybe we would have had at least one good super hero movie this summer.

  3. flammable says:

    Wait, wait, I still haven’t seen X3 yet…it’s not bad, is it?

    I FINALLY got myself to see the first two…the third better not suck!

    (I think that was the most recent movie I’ve seen…bah. Was months ago. Some things never change.)

  4. socramforever says:

    I thought you saw 3 already? Or maybe this message is so old that you did already and we spoke about it.

  5. flammable says:

    LOL, you’re right…I saw X3 already, this is an old one.

    For good measure, I haven’t seen the Die Hard movies yet, but they’re next!

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