Overspending

I was watching the audio commentary yesterday, and it struck me how much Adamson talks about spending so much on this set and that set (not in specific dollar amounts) and how many hundreds of takes they had to do, etc etc. No wonder this thing ended up costing over $200M.

Among some of the stuff: they completely built a castle from scratch, and they put in all this minute details for things that get maybe 1 minute of screen time. For example, the meeting hall for the Telmarine lords, which Adamson says they built entirely for that one five minute scene. And then for the bridge on the river, they went to a national park where a landslide had diverted a river and built the bridge for the movie, as part of the deal to allow them to do that when they were finished they helped restore the waterway to its original state (prior to the landslide).

I think all of these excesses are a result of the blank check given to the producers at the beginning of the process, and contributed to the financial weakness of the movie. I feel like they could have made the exact same movie with a little less background detail for half the budget.



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"I miss Giles."