10 Movies That Cost Twice As Much As They Needed To
4. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides may have earned over a billion dollars at the box office, but the profit margins still wouldn't have been entirely to Disney's satisfaction after the intended soft reboot of the franchise ran up production costs of $410.6m.
You'd think that taking a back-to-basics approach would have been the best option for injecting new life into a tiring series that had already suffered greatly from the law of diminishing returns, but instead director Rob Marshall threw an insane amount of money at the screen and ended up making the worst Pirates of the Caribbean movie yet.
Even if you cut the budget in half, On Stranger Tides would still cost more than Titanic, Superman Returns, X-Men: The Last Stand, Waterworld and Peter Jackson's King Kong, all of which had previously held the title of being the most expensive movie ever made at various points over the years.