10 Movies You Won't Believe Cost So Much Money

You might have criticized The Last Airbender for looking really cheap and not doing justice to the Nickelodeon series, but the studio actually did spend a tremendous amount of money on it. It's just that absolutely none of that money appeared on screen.

It's really hard to believe the budget for this movie was $150 million because all of the special effects look pretty awful, more like a product of a $40-50 million film. So many of the "big" moments feel like small scale sequences that would be made on a TV budget rather than a massive summer blockbuster. A typical Game of Thrones episode that costs just a few million dollars looks way better than this entire movie.

And unlike many of these films, The Last Airbender doesn't really have any big stars, so it's not like that's clearly where the whole budget went. No, it instead seems like Paramount gave M. Night Shyamalan all the money and resources he needed, and he just had absolutely no idea what to do with them. Meanwhile, Mad Max: Fury Road had the exact same budget as this. Now that's how you make use of your resources.