The Twilight movies are cheap but they also look it. The special effects are terrible. The wolf transformation in the New Moon trailer is weak. But hey, if you've got millions of teen girls who don't care about things like quality, why waste the money?

Yes, Twilight has some of the worst effects in a big budget movie ever. And indeed that wolf transformation looks like an unfinished effect from Narnia (not only does it look bad, the wolf looks too cartoonish). But still. It's cheap.

Well I am glad I am not the only one who thought that Wolf CGI looked horrible. I think American Werewolf in London had better werewolf effects.

That seems about right for New Moon. It really doesn't need much more than that. 60m seems a bit low for Eclipse though. It doesn't differ much from Twilight or New Moon too much, but a fair bit happens in the final chapters. Although, the Underworld films were just fine with similar budgets.

You have to understand this is Summit, too. They can't afford to give 100m+ budgets yet.

Underworld movies had lower budget. Underworld 2 had a 40-45M budget. Underword prequel was 25-30M

Given the money they make off each Twilight, they should be able to afford 100M budgets. That said, it's financially smarter not to spend that much. Lionsgate has never produced a movie that cost nearly that much either.

Well on Summit Ent. website they have info that they want to make 10-12 movies a year in range of 20-70M $. I think it's a good tactic since either they won't loss to much money or they will make a lot of cash.

With current production expenditures of $310 million (which could grow when the final budget is tallied) and a global marketing campaign that could cost as much as $150 million, "Avatar" won't have to do "Titanic" business to make money, but it will have to fill auditoriums around the world for weeks to become profitable.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 4049.story

Roland Emmerich said in an Interview with a German magazine that 2012 cost $200m and he's very proud of the fact that the movie was produced with so little money...

$200 million is "so little money"? Jesus fuck...

So 460m ?
That's not too much......just you know, the 3RD BIGGEST DOMESTIC MOVIE ALL TIME.

I can believe the 200m figure for 2012, there were no huge stars and there were only 3 long VFX sequences (most of the other scenes lasted around a minute).

310m for Avatar is...bad news.

With total costs being near $500m, or so it seems, Avatar honestly has almost no chance to become a big successful (as far as budget vs gross goes). It is a general rule that a film has to gross about 2x it's budget to become profitable, correct? Certainly nothing less than 850m is going to cut it. This isn't Pirates 3 (which probably had a similar total cost, production budget being $300m + $??? marketing) which was a sure bet to cross the profitable mark.

I'm rooting for it though.

I think that Pirates 3 had less then 100M WW marketing budget.

Variety:

$30m-40m FANTASTIC FOX
$40m NINJA ASSASSIN

I just realized that BOM has changed the budget of G-FORCE to $150m!

Bruckheimer sure is good at wasting money.

Reuters

THE BLIND SIDE - $29 million

http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/2009/1 ... ox-office/

LA Times:
$35m FANTASTIC FOX
"little less than $50m" NINJA ASSASSIN
$25m THE ROAD

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/enterta ... -soft.html

Well, G-Force mostly paid off. Looking at $290+ million worldwide (maybe $300 million depending on Japan) and will certainly be a good DVD seller.

AVATAR back to $237m...

http://www.thewrap.com/article/true-cos ... atar-11206

$26m BROTHERS
$20m ARMORED

http://www.thewrap.com/article/brothers ... -tig-11199

This weeks production budgets according to http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/enterta ... ffice.html

$90m SHERLOCK HOLMES
$85m IT'S COMPLICATED
$70m ALVIN 2
$64m NINE
$25m UP IN THE AIR

Pretty high budget for Its Complicated. I wonder if the lead actors are photorealistic CGI/Mo-Cap.

Sherlock has a 100+M worldwide marketing budget as well. WB gave it a blockbuster campaign

Nancy Meyers is terrible at managing costs, apparently. Every single one of her films cost way more than they rightfully should.

To be fair, she casts talent which is more expensive than the average actors/actresses...