10 Ridiculously Expensive Movies That Blew Their Budget

By Shaun Munro / July 17, 2013

Movie making is an enterprise most often built on a series of risks, on informed gambles taken by studios who believe - but don't know outright - that a particular property is going to be worth the considerable injection of cash they furnish their filmmakers with. Get it right, and you've got an Avatar or an Iron Man 3 on your hands, but get it wrong, and a studio ends up blowing $200 million (or these days, much more than that) on a dud that goes nowhere other than the bargain bin section of your local home video store. Here are 10 absurdly expensive movies that, in spite of considerable promise, blew their budgets on fancies and foolish pursuits, denying their own potential. While not all of these movies are flat-out awful, they simply didn't make the most of the considerable funds afforded to them, instead dragging their feet or taking the path more commonly travelled instead of trying to truly innovate and surprise...

10. Tangled

Budget: $260 million

What We Got: An entertaining if rather forgettable Disney animation that in no way earned its colossal budget, which caused it to become the second most expensive movie ever made, sitting behind Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, which inexplicably cost $300 million (though grossed close to a billion).

Though Tangled made over double its budget at the worldwide box office, that $260 million budget stems from the fact that it took a whopping six years to develop, with directors dropping in and out of the project, and the concept being constantly re-worked, such as a rumoured greater focus on the male love interest, to ensure the film appealed more to male audiences where Disney's prior film, The Princess and the Frog, did not.

To compare; James Cameron made Avatar with over $20 million less than this, whereas all we got from Disney was an entertaining if unremarkable 100-minute animated flick.