10 Great Movie Ideas Let Down By Their Budget

When a film's selling point is its willingness to de-age one of the top actors on the planet, by god you have to deliver on that effect.

Gemini Man - with its $150 million budget - did not.

Instead of creating visuals worthy of claiming Academy awards, the usually outstanding Weta Digital (responsible for The Lord of the Rings and Avatar's epic visuals) dropped the ball catastrophically and produced a younger Will Smith that look more like a video game cut-scene character than a digitally realised human being.

With the money clearly not being pumped into the visuals, that must have meant that other aspects of the film were tended to with the sizeable finances.

Nope. The script felt taped together, the settings were drab and the cinematography felt messy. So, all arrows pointed to an overpaid cast and poor marketing strategy.

Will Smith and Clive Owen's paychecks alone would not have been cheap and the promotion of the film didn't skimp on the cash either, as posters, TV spots and trailers were slapped on anything Paramount could get their hands on.

If we actually got a surprising film that didn't spend a huge chunk of its budget on spoiling the majority of the major plot points and lining the pockets of its feature players, we could have got a genuinely interesting identity thriller with spectacular visuals.

Instead we got a stuttering blip of a movie with effects that already feel outdated.