10 Movies That Cost Twice As Much As They Needed To
Flushing hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet for absolutely no reason.
It can't be easy being one of the money men charged with putting together a mega-budget Hollywood blockbuster, especially when there's hundreds of millions of dollars being funneled in and so many variables to consider, with potential billions at stake based on the quality of the final product.
The cost of the industry's highest-profile releases has soared in recent years, to the point where nobody bats an eyelid at a production being announced with a $200m budget anymore. Sometimes you can see that every single penny has been thrown up there on the screen, but other times you can find yourself wondering just how much ended up being frittered away on salaries and catering, given that you could often make a movie twice as good for half the cost.
Obviously not every movie costs an eye-watering amount to produce, but there's been more than a few occasions when audiences and critics alike have been left scratching their heads and failing to find a justifiable reason for the studio to spend the GDP of a small country on two hours of mindless entertainment.
10. Dolittle
The continuing set of strange circumstances that is 2020 has seen Dolittle bomb at the box office after terrible reviews that named it one of the worst movies of the year despite being released in the second week of January, but yet it still sits pretty as the third highest-grossing movie of the year so far.
Eddie Murphy's two stabs at bringing the good doctor to our screens aren't exactly regarded as benchmarks in cinema, but both installments combined were made for less than Robert Downey Jr.'s ill-fated attempt, and they at least managed to turn a decent-sized profit for the studio.
Effects-heavy fantasy movies aren't cheap to produce, but even with a cast of fully-animated co-stars $175m seems more than a little excessive, with three weeks of extensive reshoots adding several more zeroes onto the cost while also failing to improve the final product even one iota.
Even $100m would have been pushing it given that most people were expecting Dolittle to bomb from the moment it was first announced, but Universal forged ahead regardless.