Difficult Productions That Resulted in Great Films

Why did Transformers cost $400 million dollars to make? I don't see $400 million dollars on screen. I see maybe $400 thousand. Obviously that must have been a very troubled production. Because the director is incompetent. Or producer Steven Spielberg is laundering money. Yet they say Michael Bay gets movies in on time and under budget. That's the thing. Who set those ammounts? It's like the difference between the national debt and the deficit. I understand what you're getting at, I'm just not sure that it's a real thing that actually exists. It's more like Hollywood lore. Take a classic example like Casablanca. It's romantic to think that it went way over schedule and budget and had tons of rewrites and it's a miracle it ever got made at all. But it's just not true in any meaningful way. These guys were given basically unlimited resources and when they needed more they just had to ask, nicely, oy vey! It would make more sense to describe a movie like Dune as a troubled production, but even that would only be from the perspective of the director over artistic differences. How about Blade Runner where Ridley Scott is still trying to milk ever dollar out of his own fans with a million different versions. Something deeply wrong with that production, decades in the making. Bunch of rich brats. El Mariachi. Now there's a troubled production. It was on a shoestring budget and took a lot of resourcefulness. Everything had to go right and it did.