Did 'The Beast' Really Cost only $200,000 To Make ?
I have heard that "The Beast" only cost $200,000 to make.
That seems like very little. Could it really be true ?
Ummm, the movie was made in 1958, 200K was a lot of money back then.
shareHamRaw says that "The Beast" was made in 1958. That would have been some trick.
The film was released in 1953. Also, my question was based on the fact that
"KING KONG" ( 1933 ) , cost $500,000 to make. Way back THEN , 500K was an AWFUL LOT of money to spend on a movie.
Yes the film cost around 200 thousand clams....It was an independant film that Hal "Harry" Chester and Jack Deitz raised the money for. They then sold it to Warners for , I think, 750 thousand. Warners made about 2,7 million off of it.
Any way you slice it, this is a big success and if the numbers don't knock your socks off it's because we are talking over fifty years ago when a dollar from today would get you five or six bucks....inflation...now there's a REAL monster!
http://www.woodywelch.com
My information is that while BEAST only cost about $200Gs to make, Chester and Dietz sold it to Warner for only $450,000. WB scrapped the musical score for a new one, did some other minor tweaking, and ended up taking in $5.5 million worldwide. Dietz, for one, was beside himself when he saw how the money rolled in for the Bros., and vowed never to make that mistake again (not that he ever hit on such a hot property again).
$5.5m may not sound like a lot now but it was enough to make BEAST one of the top-grossing films of 1953.
By the way, KING KONG cost $672,000 to make in 1933, about $300,000 over its original budget. David O. Selznick, then in charge of production at RKO, liked the way the film was going and squeezed money from other productions to make sure KONG had all it needed. Word of mouth about the film was so great even before its release that MGM (which had refused to loan out Jean Harlow for the leading lady role, thereby making Fay Wray immortal) offered RKO $400,000 over KONG's negative cost for the film. RKO heads wisely declined and the film made almost $1.8 million in its initial run, a huge sum in the Depression. This is aside from the several, extremely profitable, re-releases RKO made over the next twenty-plus years.