Bruno

The cost for movies in the modern era is crazy when you think about the money being pumped into it and for what? A 2 hours length viewing and some films have budgets containing millions and millions of pounds. Then there’s the risk of the movie flopping, John Carter for example, a large amount of money was paved into that film and in the outcome, it lost a significant amount of money. The newest instalment of the Avengers franchise has been rumoured to have a $1 billion budget! If this rumour is to be true, then the Disney owned Avengers will be the most expensive movie ever made. It is scary to think where these producers get this money from! However it’s not always about the riches and the money, it’s about being clever, knowing want to do with a small budget and making the outcome bigger. For indie directors/producers, it’s been known that they have supported their projects with loans, but it’s knowing how to use a loan wisely- knowing the ins and outs, thus turning it into your advantage where they have managed to exceed their borrowing amount to a very large payment at the end of the production schedule. Here a look at some of the movies that exceeded their budget in regards to total gross:

Reservoir Dogs

Tarantino’s debut movie Reservoir Dogs made just a shy of $3m at the US box office which is terrible when you think about the total gross films get now days, but when the bigger picture is- it cost less than half of that to make. Showing on just 16 screens, this movie became one of the defining films of the modern era, so despite the $3m income, the $1.2m was well spent.

Avatar

Quite interestingly, Avatar turned out to be less expensive than audiences believed, it was known to cost between $300 and £500 million but in fact it ended up having a price tag of $237 million.  Avatar transformed film technology and motion capture animation. David Cameron’s team developed the technology and software for the films motion capture which is probably why Avatar was the first film to make over $2 billion worldwide and still remains the highest-grossing movie going.

The Blair Witch Project

Still the gold-standard of budget filmmaking, this indie project cost only around $750,000 but grossed $0.25bn. Compared to this budget and gross, the Lord of the Rings trilogy would have had to take close to $100bn.

Halloween

The kingpin of horror, this movie was made with an estimated $320,000 and it then ended up taking $60m and set the template for a new style of horror. This is still one of the scariest and jumpy films out there in the horror genre.

Little Miss Sunshine

Now this is clever business. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris managed to make this lovey heart-warming movie with a budget of $8 million, which is a lot of money, but in film terms its pretty average. Yet, that said, the movie ended up winning two Oscars and grossed $100m-plus, so at the end of the day, that’s pretty good business.    

El Mariachi

Robert Rodriguez had a $7,000 budget, almost half of which he raised by participating in experimental clinical drug testing while living in Austin, Texas. Some say the sandwich budget in an average film...It launched his career and I remember bringing Desperado his sequel to Cannes  made for a 1500 times bigger budget! I was running the marketing for Sony at that time, and the party we threw on the Carlton Beach has exceeded the original film budget by a significant amount :-)

Rodriguez also gave insight into his low budget approach to simulate machine gun fire. The problem was that when using real guns, as opposed to the specially designed blank firing firearms used in most films, the blanks would jam the weapon after being fired once. To solve this, Rodriguez filmed the firing of one blank from different angles, dubbed canned machine gun sounds over it, and had the actors drop bullet shells to the ground to make it look like as if multiple rounds had been shot.  In addition, he occasionally used water guns instead of real guns to save money.

Rodriguez also reveals that the squibs used in shootout scenes were simply condoms filled with fake blood and fixed over weightlifting belts. 

Rodriguez also noted the use of improvisation. The tortoise that crawls in front of the Mariachi was not planned, but was kept in as a good idea.  Similarly, there is a scene in which the Mariachi buys a coconut, but Rodriguez forgot to show him paying for the fruit; instead of driving back to the place to shoot additional scenes, Rodriguez decided to build in a voice-over in which the Mariachi asserts that the coconuts were for free.  Improvisation was also useful to cover up continuity mistakes: at the end of the movie, the Mariachi has his left hand shot, but Rodriguez forgot to bring the metal glove to cover up the actor's hand; he solved it by packing his hand with black duct tape.