4. Spending So Much Money Is Unnecessary
Filmmaking tends to be an obscenely expensive process but it is possible to make a decent film on a more modest budget. Hot Fuzz was two hours long, had a cast full of big names including Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton, and boasted a final act full of gun battles and car chases. So what was its production budget when adjusted for inflation? £9,399,754. But maybe Hot Fuzz isn't the best example since it was a British film made largely outside of the conventional studio system. So let's look at a Hollywood blockbuster as another example. X-Men was a large scale comic-book film crammed full of CGI, action setpieces, and award-winning actors released in 2000 that helped to establish the trend of more grounded comic-book films. And it was made with a production budget of $75 million. Even when you adjust that for inflation, it comes to $101,700,348. Just under half of what X-Men: First Class cost and what the usual cost of a blockbuster film is currently. If X-Men can go from script to screen for $101 million and the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy can be heralded as such a giant of cinema on a budget of just under $330 million (when adjusting the trilogy's collective budget for inflation), it follows that it should still be possible for films in the modern age to be made for that kind of money. As I've said above, the cost of labour, CGI, and of building sets, props etc may have increased independently from inflation in recent years but I personally can't see it having reached a point where film budgets would increase so drastically because of it being a significant factor. Another matter to consider is that making films on lower budgets would allow studios to increase their output while spending more or less the same amount of money. And more product means more profit as well as more work for actors and crewmembers.