10 Movies You Won't Believe Cost So Much Money

Movies can be pretty insanely expensive to make, so studios usually want every dollar to appear on screen. With a film like Avengers: Age of Ultron, it's obvious where all the money went: it's chock full of big name actors, huge explosions, and lots of CGI. In other words, Marvel's $250 million budget was entirely justified, particularly given the audience response and box office take. Even Ant-Man looks fantastic despite costing half as much as Ultron, so it's all just about using the budget wisely.  

But that doesn't always happen, and there are some films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars without looking like it at all. This phenomenon is often due to production issues, like an extremely delayed film shoot that sends the budget through the roof. Other times, the studio just doesn't allocate resources wisely, blowing huge amounts of money on things that don't really improve the film's aesthetic.

The result can be a dumb romantic comedy that's as expensive as an action blockbuster, or a movie with a big budget but that still has pretty crappy special effects. In those cases, it's usually all too easy to forget exactly how much money was wasted on them...

This Matthew McConaughey movie about an explorer searching for a lost battleship grossed $120 million worldwide, a somewhat respectable amount for a simple action-comedy. But it still ended up being a huge flop because of some incredibly reckless spending during the film's production.

The initial budget for Sahara was $80 million, but that number quickly went up and up during filming. The entire detailed budget was later revealed via the LA Times, and it included over $200,000 in bribes to the local government. And though the final movie only credits four, the studio hired ten screenwriters to take passes at the script, costing $3.8 million.  

But there's another reason the movie doesn't look like it cost so much: some really expensive sequences that drove up the budget were just cut out entirely. At one point, the crew worked on a massive vintage airplane crash scene which cost them $2 million to execute. That scene was deleted from the film, so this $2 million was totally wasted. Not exactly the most economical production, huh?