Here's the interesting thing on budget. I quick checked 2019 vs 2023 for Disney (SO, open to corrections if I messed something up, like I said, I went quick with it). I believe there were 14 movies released this year so far to theaters, and I found the budgets for 12 of them. Those averaged a budget of $180.4 million. In 2019? The average was $180.4 million. SO, the top 12 movies both years cost the EXACT same amount to make. NOW, 2019 is skewed drastically. You had two MONSTER movies that were culminations of their two largest franchises that they spent a ton to make. But, you could say that about Indy as well. Also, this year, there were 7 movies that cost $200 million or more to make. 2019, that number is just 4. But it's interesting to me that the budgets may not be quite as out of hand as we believe they are. And I think it points to the idea there is a lot more in play than just "These movies are costing too much to make."
I think theater costs have risen too much (remember, I personally said no to Captain Marvel opening week cause I wasn't willing to pay the price. Well, Thanksgiving weekend, I went from like $15 a ticket to $8, and popcorn was discounted as well). I also think the way Disney retrained viewers to wait 2-3 months to watch it on D+ may be the LARGEST impact. I think if you are going to need to buy it for $30 anyways to see it within the next year, people will be much more likely to hit the theaters for it.
Respectfully, $180 million is a
huge budget for a film, whether it’s 2019 or 2023.
This simply shows that Disney has not been able to control its production costs for years.
At the time,
Terminator 2 (1991) was rumored to be the first film with a $100 million budget. (Although the exact budget is debated - certainly
True Lies passed the $100 million mark a few years later.) Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $240 million. At the time, it was an outlier and its reported cost received a tremendous amount of attention in the press. Yet according to the link I provided earlier, T2 doesn’t even make the list of most expensive (adjusted for inflation) films ever made.
Now Disney has multiple films that are (by your calculation)
averaging $180 million in production costs.
Disney has forgotten how to make small films. This means that films they produce are under tremendous pressure to make hundreds of millions at the box office.
As
@celluloid wrote earlier, Eisner’s strategy was to mix it up, including going after
Three Men and a Baby scale films, with an inflation adjusted production cost of about $40 million. The most financially successful film of its year, it brought in $240 million on a $15 million budget.
Iger had tremendous successes with Pixar, Lucas Films, and Marvel Studios, but the public is fatigued with the endless stream of big budget films. These films no longer have the draw they once did.
It’s time to look in a different direction.
