I read that the budget for this film is 110 million dollars! No wonder Disney's traditionally animated film studios are being closed. How can this movie cost 110 million to make? Can someone explain the concept of animation budgets?
sharei am no animation expert but i think the reason why it cost so much to conceive is the fact that there are so many characters they have to create. on top of that, they had to enact the scenes for each character, including every move they make, as well as their location. That sounds like a lot of money, but the movie looks hilarious so it looks worth it.
shareI know, but Disney has been making full-length animated movies for years. There's no way Dumbo, Beauty and the Beast, or 101 Dalmations could have cost that much to make. Why such the high budget?
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I will say this only once since most people don't know...there is no way this film cost that much money! Bigger than that...a lot of these films that have those big tags and a good portion of the money spent never makes it to the screen!!! Yes...stealing! It doesn't cost that kind of money for a number of reasons...I work in animation and have been in the game for over 20 years. there are animators working from home who if coordinated could make a full feature in under a year for FAR less! The effects cost a TON less nowadays my friends. Go and price the software and system required to run the software and see for yourself! Go get a good forensic CPA / accountant and try and follow the money. Lets remember...this is Disney. The same company thats somehow over 13 billion in debt...even with all the titles they have released that are making tons of money. No wonder Pixar is cutting it's ties with this corrupt company. Oh well...
shareYou might want to consider what it would cost today to make movies such as Snowhite, Dumbo and 101 Dalmations today, as they made it back then. I suspect the cost would far exceed $100 million.
Why? Well, a movie is 24 frames per second, so multiply that out by the number of minutes. Each frame typically has characters moving. While you can do it on twos or worse, it will show, depending on what action is going on (see Saturday morning cartoons). In the time frame of those old movies each cell was really a cell, painted on by artists. Make a mistake and start over. There were many cells per frame, depending on the number of characters. You can reuse the background and make one background which is large for pans and such. You then need to take all the backgrounds and cells and take a picture, one at a time, to put it on film. Mistakes or if it does not work correctly, start over. This is after all the story is done, which often has to be redone when you get it finished because it does not work out like you would like.
Each character is painted with an outline (101 Dalmations used xeroxgraphy to reduce the work by creating the black outlines). Then you have to paint the colors in. Simple colors are easier, others require more work such as an air brush.
What you see in a second takes a lot of time to create, but it is art. To see the backgrounds which are used is impressive as each work is typically a work of art and far more impressive than when it is in the movie. It would show if it was not at that quality. An Animated Feature is often consists of numerous works of art (each frame). You can take a snapshot of a mountain in a fraction of a second, but to paint it take much longer, then consider the difference between the two.
Add to all that the voices since if you use known names, those voices are expensive.
Recent films have used computers to make the work easier, but salaries have increased, especially with the competition. Several years ago the salaries of the artists increased dramatically. More recently Disney has cut the salaries. Ever have a 30-50% pay cut for doing the same work? That is assuming that the person got to keep their job, otherwise it is 100%.
No way that the old films could have cost as much? I would have to wonder how they even managed to make the film, much less the cost.
Most people have no idea of what it takes to make an animated movie nor the time it takes. Live action can be filmed at 24 frames per second, an animated movie can not as you have to create each and every frame, compositing in multiple characters with the background.
Many movies today are getting more and more expensive because of the cost of the salaries and also because the filming is done with little regard to the cost of having to digitally modify the images (wire removal, special effects, etc.). Fix it in post is the line. Then instead of filming practical effects, it is far more cool to create the effects digitally, which often cost more.
Well, for one thing, technilogical advancecments. Revising storylines, storyboards. Acting out all scenes, acting, expressions. The hundreds of animators and other staff working on the project. Equipment and supplies like mics, cameras, pencils, ink, erasers, lots and lots of paper. Probably epquipment and supplies becoming more expensive. The price on A-list actors lending their voices. Film. Copies. Shipments. Character studies. Educational field trips to get first hand experiences in westerns. All this and more. if you look back at the recent disney animated budgets, this is nearly average in today's standards. Treasure Planet- $140. Tarzan, Atlantis, and Lilo & stitch are pretty much near the same budgets. look around IMDB site and look at box office and business buttons.
"...when Pirates of the Carribean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists."
Yeah, around 100 million is usually how much animated films cost. It is hard to believe that they cost that much money, but once you add everything in, it gets to be pretty expensive.
~I'd give her a HA! And a HI-YA! And then a OUU-WA! And I'd kick her, sir.~
with all the a list actors they got for the movie, all of the animation they had in it, as well as all the action sequences( like the cow doing karate), i am not suprised it cost so much to make.
shareLilo only cost 80 milllion (about 60 million production + 20 million marketing)...and a nice chunk of that went towards securing publishing and needle-drop rights for the ELvis songs and licensing the Elvis paraphenalia.
The biggest expenses for these films are usually the extremely high overhead (there was about 2000 employees at Walt Disney Feature Animation in 2000), and costly reshoots and overhauls (which this picture in particular had a lot of. It's been in production since 1995).
$110 million is ridiculous, but I guess Disney figures they'll recoup their costs due to the dearth of good G-rated films (remember how much "The Grinch" made). The Lion King's budget was under $80 million, so maybe it's not all that bad.
Even so, it doesn't make much sense today compared to the budgets for Pixar's Finding Nemo and the upcoming The Incredibles, both under $95 million and in full 3D. Perhaps Disney cheated and included some of the cost of the 3D animation studios they must be setting up for their first 3D feature, Chicken Little.
for an animation movie of this calibur, i feel that the price is pretty feasible for the amount of time and effort they put into the production and promotion of the movie.
shareI have no kids and I'm not necessarily an animation person so I was truly excited to see the numbers on this film. It's not that it cost them 110 million, it's that it did so bad.
How can Disney have such a powerhouse hit in the lion king and screw up every other film. I have to hand it to the Finding Nemo people though. It goes to prove my film-making mantra: make good movies with great stories that appeal to a core audience (as long as you are consciously aware of your core audience)and they will come.
Hopefully Disney can realize this before it turns out it's first 3d flop.
It's not traditional animation's fault, mind you. It's Disney's innefficient budgeting of resources.
They tried to turn out 2 films a year out of Feature Animation, resulting in them upping their staff to about 2500 people over the worls, and resulting in humoungous overhead.
This picture in particualr has been in the works since after "Pocahontas" in 1995, and it's gone through numerous changes and do-overs since then, resulting in more $$$.
And BTW, CGI animation is just as expensive (if you take into account the amount of money spent in the amount of production time, it's MORE expensive). The budgets on Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo were $115 million and $90 million, respectively.
Animated films have always cost a lot of money to make.
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I'll go by the recent traditionally animated movies which incorporate CGI effects into the story, and then match them up against Disney's works.
IRON GIANT - 48 Million (Not bad... Not bad at all.)
PRINCE OF EGYPT - 60 Million
SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS - 60 Million (And it wound up with seamless CGI/Hand-Drawn composition to boot. These guys are MASTERS.)
TITAN A.E. - 75 Million
OSMOSIS JONES - 75 Million
SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON - 80 Million
ROAD TO EL DORADO - 90 Million (Not sure what happened there.)
Now for Disney:
LILO AND STITCH - 80 Million
ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE - 90 Million
EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE - 100 Million (Wait a second - the animation wasn't THAT complicated, was it?)
HOME ON THE RANGE - 110 Million (Whoa! Now that's inexcusable!)
TREASURE PLANET - 140 Million (To animate flying ships? Please tell me there was rendering problems...)
TARZAN - 150 Million (OOOWWWW!!!! Well... at least they made a little profit off that.)
Do a side-by-side comparison with the finished visual results of the Disney movies against the competitors. The best finished projects in my opinion visually for Disney were "Lilo" and "Tarzan," but I still don't think they hold a torch against the others.
Just for kicks, here's the 3D movies...
TOY STORY - 30 Million (Considering the technology then, that's expected.)
A BUG'S LIFE - 45 Million (Technology getting better...)
ANTZ - 60 Million
SHREK - 60 Million (Dreamworks is GOOD at sticking to budgets!)
TOY STORY 2 - 90 Million
FINDING NEMO - 94 Million
MONSTERS INC. - 115 Million (That was a lot of hair to render.)
FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN - 135 Million (It grossed 32 million in box office and 79 in rentals, but the real money was made off of the technology they created with this movie which is used in a lot of movies today. And it STILL costed less than Tarzan to make!)
~But hey - that's just me.~
I don't know anything about movie making or costs, but my kids LOVED this film and so did I. It's not usually like that.
I enjoyed the great variety of voices, from Roseanne to Steve Buscemi. Even the small roles had a voice that you had heard somewhere before.
So I hope "Home on the Range" ends up finding an audience. As opposed to "Teacher's Pet," which I wouldn't even take my kids to a discount movie house to see. It's got Paul Reubens in it. No way will I give that creep our money!
I will miss the hand drawn style of "Home on the Range." There's really something special about that. A lost art I guess.
Interesting...thanks.
I don't think thise one will recoup the 110 million. Not at the box office anyway. Perhaps when video sales are added in...
I'm surprised the Pixar films were rleatively cheap. Those are the ones my family has liked the best. Other than the Pixar movies, there has not been a big Disney hit with my kids since Lion King.
Once the actual production on a film gets started, it doesn't cost as much. Most movies cost extra because they don't have a solid script or premise to begin with. The original premise for "Emperor's New Groove" was entitled "Empire of the Sun" and followed an Aztec-style Prince-And-The-Pauper story before they made several revisions to it and included a llama. And "Monsters Inc." had about two or three different storyboards going for it - you can see the alternate movie pitches on the DVD.
A while ago though, I recall "Hercules" being a hit with my family personally.
~But hey - that's just me.~
Okay folks, you wanna know why animation is so expensive? I can tell you. I'm an ex-Disney animation artist, so I oughtta know.
The sky-rocketing of feature costs began when Dreamworks was established and animator's salaries went up. But even when the industry stablilised a bit and slaries dropped, the costs stayed high. Why? Easy:
Executives greenlighting half-baked ideas which then get a FORTUNE spent on them in preproduction. Writers, storyboarders, concept artists, software developers. They all cost money. A feature will spend AT LEAST a full year in preproduction before LAYOUTS even see it (the first stage of animation production). Disney, unfortunately, has the bad habit of 'Too Many Cooks' in their writing teams. Home on the Range had no fewer than SIX writers. By comparison, the SLIGHTLY lower-costing features, like Lilo or Groove, had 2 writers each. And in both cases, the writers were also the directors. Having a very small directorial-writing team invariably drops the cost. If the team has a good solid story, even better, because that means less for executives to pick apart and fewer rewrites, which ALSO jack up costs because production has to halt while rewrites are done. This leaves other departments sitting around twiddling their thumbs and still getting paid.
There is also the large factor of making sure the computer systems are capable of rendering the effects the directors want. Every new feature invariably involves the creation of some new proprietary software to render some new amazing background effect (in Tarzan's case, it was Deep Canvas, not to mention the fact that the Tarzan and Sabor teams were based in the Paris studio). This is the same with most animated features these days - Pixar and PDI do it as well. CGI is developing faster than the features are, so every new feature usually requires some major computer overhauls. (Computers are used for all 2D animation scanning, coloring and compositing. The rostrum camera and hand-inking are extinct now, except in the 3rd-world tv cartoon sweatshops).
So in a nutshell - it's the overinflated preproduction and technological requirements that have inflated feature costs. The answer? Get rid of executive micromanagement and only hire DECENT close-knit writer/directors, for a start! Lilo only cost 80 million for good reason - Chris Sanders and Dean Deblois wrote, storyboarded (with 2 others) and directed that whole thing themselves.
But I for one can't fathom how Home on the Range could cost so much either! ^_-
I'm guessing it went on all those wasted celebrity voices (PATRICK 'Kronk' WARBURTON was in there! For, like, 2 LINES! WASTE!!!) and maybe Alan Menken's salary has gone up. But he's worth it. The one redeeming feature of HotR, imo, is the music. Menken has never done a bum score.
And if you listen to 'Will the Sun Never Shine' and think about the death of 2D, it brings a tear to your eye! well... it did to me ;)
That's really interesting, actually. But what strikes me is that they've already gotten the blends between 2D and 3D down to a fine art, so why would they keep updating their software if what they were using before worked perfectly?
~But hey - that's just me.~
an attempt at trying to make the films more "efficiently" (read: to make it easier for the execs to get things they don't like changed)
shareI'll go by the recent traditionally animated movies which incorporate CGI effects into the story, and then match them up against Disney's works.
IRON GIANT - 48 Million (Not bad... Not bad at all.)
Now if this film cost less than $50 mil...Disney has no (acceptable) excuse. None whatsoever.
PRINCE OF EGYPT - 60 Million
SINBAD: LEGEND OF THE SEVEN SEAS - 60 Million (And it wound up with seamless CGI/Hand-Drawn composition to boot. These guys are MASTERS.)
TITAN A.E. - 75 Million
OSMOSIS JONES - 75 Million
SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON - 80 Million
ROAD TO EL DORADO - 90 Million (Not sure what happened there.)
a very complicated film...and I'm pretty sure Elton John and Tim Rice didn't come cheap...
Now for Disney:
LILO AND STITCH - 80 Million
ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE - 90 Million
I've seen $115 million for this one usually...but I guess that's with the marketing budget thrown in as well (well, "Lilo's" marketing budget is included in its $80 mil)
EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE - 100 Million (Wait a second - the animation wasn't THAT complicated, was it?)
they made one-and-a-half movies. Check the trivia for that film.
HOME ON THE RANGE - 110 Million (Whoa! Now that's inexcusable!)
again, they made one-and-a-half movies.
TREASURE PLANET - 140 Million (To animate flying ships? Please tell me there was rendering problems...)
nope. They knew from day one the film was gonna cost $140 million. It looks it, too...too bad the storytelling and pacing wasn't up to the animation quality. All that CGI costs money.
TARZAN - 150 Million (OOOWWWW!!!! Well... at least they made a little profit off that.)
ALl that CGI (and the development of the technology to make it) costs money.
Do a side-by-side comparison with the finished visual results of the Disney movies against the competitors. The best finished projects in my opinion visually for Disney were "Lilo" and "Tarzan," but I still don't think they hold a torch against the others.
Just for kicks, here's the 3D movies...
TOY STORY - 30 Million (Considering the technology then, that's expected.)
A BUG'S LIFE - 45 Million (Technology getting better...)
ANTZ - 60 Million
SHREK - 60 Million (Dreamworks is GOOD at sticking to budgets!)
TOY STORY 2 - 90 Million
FINDING NEMO - 94 Million
MONSTERS INC. - 115 Million (That was a lot of hair to render.)
FINAL FANTASY: THE SPIRITS WITHIN - 135 Million (It grossed 32 million in box office and 79 in rentals, but the real money was made off of the technology they created with this movie which is used in a lot of movies today. And it STILL costed less than Tarzan to make!)
Well, "Final Fantasy" was made by a staff of probablt about 300. Tarzan was made by a staff of over 1200. People gotta get paid.
No matter what the factors, one hundred and ten million dollars for a measly seventy-five minutes of film--credits included--is ridiculous. And given the quality of those seventy-five minutes (and the rotten box-office take it's earning) certain people need to be relieved of their jobs.
shareYup. Unfortunately, it will be the wrong ones.
shareIt cost aprox $1 million a minute to make an animated movie....traditional or 3D. Disney just figured it would cost the same to make, and 3d is more popular. But Without Pixar i cant see there 3d being any good...remember Dinosaur?
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You're right about Dinosaur. It was okay, but not one of the great ones.
Looks like their next 3D project independent of Pixar will be called "Chicken Little". Hard ot tell how good it will be from just the preview (on Brother Bear video).
I bet "The Incredibles", made by Pixar, will be great.
Tragically, though, it's the wrong people who are getting fired.
Disney needs a serious dead-wood burning on the executive level.
Thanks to Roy and Stanley and the savedisney campaign, that's precisely where the industry is watching. Will Eisner go down? let's certainly hope so.
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Or maybe they're justifying the death of hand-drawn animation. Which was worse, this, Brother Bear, or Treasure Planet? Too horrible to contemplate.
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And I liked Lilo and Stitch ... a lot in fact.
shareYeah, it does sound ridiculous especially if you consider that DUMBO had a budget of $950,000, as a for instance. Of course, in 1941, there were a lot of studio workers being paid $35 a week and probably less. There were no well known stars doing the voices. Expenses would all have sounded ridiculously low. As a point of comparison, GONE WITH THE WIND had a budget of $3.9 million.
$110 mil considering the names of the voice actors, the probable wages of the studio workers, and the technological expenses sounds high, but not really all that ridiculous.
This film was supposed to be a drama. Tons of rewrite was done before the final product.
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