10 Expensive Movies With Budgets That Spiralled Out Of Control

6. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

Hironobu Sakaguchi's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was certainly an ambitious undertaking. The first photorealistic computer-animated film, the movie utilized cutting-edge techniques to bring the director's vision to life. However, despite the frequently stunning visuals the movie itself is an underwhelming experience and failed to recoup a budget that almost doubled the initial estimate. In production for four years, The Spirits Within employed 200 people to work on the painstaking animation that utilized 960 workstations to render every frame of the movie, of which there are over 140,000. Unsurprisingly for such a groundbreaking project, things became very expensive. Originally budgeted at $70m, by the time the movie was completed the costs had risen to $137m and effectively ended production company Square Pictures. Despite praise for the quality of the animation, critical and commercial reception to the movie was lukewarm at best. Given how massively the production costs had escalated, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within needed to be a massive hit. It wasn't, and a worldwide gross of just over $85m resulted in a huge financial loss once marketing and distribution costs had been factored in.