So 2005, 2006, and 2007 were fine years for Disney on the live-action end.
Then some problems came about in 2008...
sequel went. The budget was significantly higher, $225 million. It worked for the sequel to the beloved
wasn’t perhaps all that appropriate for a chunk of the family audiences that the first one won. There was controversy over its violence and PG rating, and whatnot. It wasn’t as well-received either, and it opened in the competitive summer rather than the holiday season, where it could grow insane legs. It opened well enough, but it didn't have the original's longevity. Overseas it wasn't anywhere near as big as part uno, too. Something happened there...
certainly made a healthy amount of money worldwide, but it wasn’t enough to double its behemoth budget. It was technically a big-scale flop. Disney no longer wanted anything to do with
, so they shipped it off. Fox took over from there and spent a more modest amount on the third film,
, which came out in 2010 and was profitable. On top of not throwing gazillions at it, Fox released it in the winter and it had more time to catch on and breathe, plus it was more family-friendly. A fourth one is in the works...
.
came out, it was time to create new big budget films that could possibly start franchises. Films that would take the baton from
's second installment not doing well. Disney was left with
being in limbo. The back-up plan was in order...
A very family-friendly live-action/CG critter romp called
G-Force came out in 2009, costing $150 million. It did fine enough domestically, being your typical leggy kids flick. Overseas it did okay, too... but in all it didn’t do well enough to warrant sequels. It fell shy of $300 million, double its budget. It was too much of a kids-only pic, had it been more for all ages, it could've done some very good business. It was the family film that skewed all ages, like
National Treasure and the first
Narnia.
Next in line were
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,
The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and a massive, no-holds-barred sequel to
TRON titled
TRON: Legacy.
Pirates of the Caribbean’s fourth installment was in the works alongside these pictures,
John Carter of Mars was in early development along with
The Lone Ranger.
A lot of these pictures are very much like
Pirates of the Caribbean. They were all big budget, they were all very risky and perhaps weren’t guaranteed hits. A majority of them were also rated PG-13...
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, for a fine example, is based on a video game series. A video game series whose more recent entries were rated T and M. Video game-based films normally don’t make for box office hits, but that’s due to poor writing and the resulting films turning out to be undesirable. There were exceptions, of course, and maybe
Prince of Persia could buck the trend.
Pirates did it with pirate movies, so why couldn’t
Prince of Persia do just that with video game-based movies?
They got a $200 million budget, the director of
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a rather agreeable PG-13 rating and tone, well-known actors... What could possibly go wrong? Halfway down its road to release, Disney saw a huge management shift. Out went Walt Disney Pictures Chairman Dick Cook, in came a rather inexperienced Rich Ross...
Ross fired a lot of people within the wing, getting rid of senior marketing people and replacing them with rather inexperienced new, “fresh”, “young” blood. Problem was, this group of people didn’t seem to know how to handle
Prince of Persia. The marketing failed to get tons of audiences in the seats on opening weekend, the film opened with a very disappointing $30 million on the Memorial Day weekend. It had decent legs, but it only made $90 million stateside. Worldwide, it made $336 million. The film failed to double its ridiculous budget...
![]() |
Remember how Box Office Mojo jokingly
wrote about how the ads made the film
look like it was titled "May 28"? |
But then someone will say the tired old, "It flopped because it was bad!"
Prince of Persia's slipshod quality is no excuse for the film's box office performance. As shown many, many, many times before, you can take a not-so-good movie and make it look good to audiences. Look at how Top 50-100 films aren't all that well-received!
National Treasure is a fine example: The Rotten Tomatoes score is 44%, it got mixed and negative reviews, don't say "movies flop because they are bad!" Did
Pinocchio flop in 1940 because it was bad? Did
Blade Runner flop in 1982 because it was bad? Did
The Iron Giant flop in 1999 because it was bad?
Anyways...
Perhaps Disney, when greenlighting the film, shouldn’t have counted the proverbial chickens before they hatched... Why in the world did the budget skyrocket to $200 million? That’s an awful lot for any film, even something based on a well-known IP!
Maybe
Persia should've costed $150 million instead, so $336 million wouldn't seem too bad. More than double the budget, and it seems that Disney at least expects a film to make 2x the budget because they can handle the other things, what with being a humungous company and all. (A studio/company DreamWorks, on the other hand, probably requires their films to make more than 2 1/2x their budgets. 3x, even!)
A month earlier, Warner Bros. put out the $125 million
Clash of the Titans. FX-heavy out the wazoo, with creatures and action and stuff... Why couldn't
Prince of Persia cost nearly as much? How much did they pay the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal?
Earlier that year, Disney scored a monster hit with another huge-scale live-action picture... Now I didn't mention this one earlier because it arguably wasn't much of a risk despite its massive budget...
You can probably guess what it is...
The $200 million-costing
Alice in Wonderland...
Alice in Wonderland already had so much going for it, so it really wasn't as big of a risk. Why?
Everyone knows the classic story, it's arguably iconic. A lot of people are familiar with Walt Disney's 1951 animated film based on the property so people probably saw this is as a remake/reimagining of the Disney classic rather than just another adaptation of the Lewis Carroll stories, Tim Burton directing, the marketing campaign - fired up in mid 2009 - was already great, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, the film looked like a must-see...
Then something else happened during the holiday season of 2009...
A little movie made by James Cameron...
Avatar.After that film came a very brief 3D craze. Now everybody had to see
Alice in Wonderland... And everybody did. $300 million+ domestic, to everyone’s surprise, and over $1 billion worldwide!
That beat out the maddest of box office predictions! By a country mile!
So
Alice was big,
Persia lost money. The safe bet won, the risk didn't.
The post-Cook marketing people also left
The Sorcerer's Apprentice to die, a lame $150 million-costing film that appealed to few. With a modest budget it could’ve been something of a small hit, as it did carry a PG rating and was more family-friendly. It didn't, however, appeal to adults and teens unlike a good family film, the marketing failed to sell it. With a roughly $100 million budget, it could've done well enough. The film did have good legs during the summer, and it ultimately collected $215 million worldwide. Of course that's pretty bad for a film expected to make at least $300 million...
Then came
TRON: Legacy.
TRON: Legacy is very much a Dick Cook-era production like
Alice,
Persia, and
Sorcerer's Apprentice, and perhaps they overshot things once again when giving it a $170 million budget. The original
TRON, which Walt Disney Productions made and put out in 1982, was not a very conventional film that also happened to carry a big budget and groundbreaking special effects. It didn’t do well at the box office, but it did garner a wide base over the years. Disney seemed to act off of that alone, or maybe they felt that
TRON and its ideas would be more relevant with modern audiences considering that computers were still somewhat foreign to most American moviegoers in the early 1980s...
Still, spending $170 million on a
TRON sequel was a big risk...
The marketing campaign already went into full gear two years before it even came out. In 2008, a test trailer showed up out of nowhere at Comic-Con, shocking and amazing the attendees. That same test trailer was given an official release in summer 2009, as the film was already underway. The post-Cook marketing people took the campaign up to eleven, marketing the living daylights out of the film.
One of Rich Ross’ main “goals” as Chairman of Walt Disney Pictures was to make pictures for young boys, a demographic that Disney felt they were scaring off at the time. It’s the reason why Walt Disney Animation Studios was briefly forced to cease making films based on fairy tales that happened to be about princesses, it’s why
Rapunzel was retitled to
Tangled, it’s also why some particular projects were greenlit later on down the road. We'll get to those...
Ross saw potential in
TRON: Legacy and assumed, because it would be in 3D, it mostly took place in a big sci-fi fantasy world, and because of the success of
Alice behind them, that it would be the next
Avatar. That’s right... A sequel to a cult classic being the next
Avatar... The marketing campaign for the film was
huge, they pulled out all the stops on it.
TRON: Legacy actually did very well. It had a great domestic run, and it grossed a strong $400 million worldwide, but against that hefty budget and the aggressive marketing, the gross kind of looked weak. A third film stalled and stalled, the franchise slowly lost traction. The third film is reportedly set to shoot in October...
Ross’ Disney was beginning to crumble by the beginning of 2011, a little over a full year into his tenure. He was dumping Cook spillover from the potential hits (
Persia) to the oncoming clunkers (
Mars Needs Moms), and was green lighting very few new projects... One of the pics he greenlit was
Prom, which felt like a Disney Channel movie and should've been exactly that. It did nothing in theaters, it disappeared with grace...
He also greenlit
Oz The Great and Powerful and the long-gestating
The Lone Ranger. The former because of
Alice's success, the latter because... Maybe he felt a guns-a-blazin' Western fit right in with his "chase the young boy audience" strategy, and maybe he thought that would be the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster that would be the next
Pirates, if
Persia ended up not being just that.
Maleficent also moved forward under his watch, again, because of
Alice's success, and later the success of reimagined fairy tale flicks like Universal's successful
Snow White and the Huntsman.
At the same time he shuttered many things. He and his cronies barked death to 2D animated films and fairy tales after late 2009's
The Princess and the Frog only did moderately well. However, it was too late to cancel upcoming Disney Animation fairy tale
Tangled, but he did go as far as getting the original title changed to the awful title it has now. (I never liked that title, never. One of the other pending "non-girly" titles,
The Secret Tower, was far better.)
Tangled was a hit, and now he was singing a different tune, fairy tales were a-ok under his watch now, which is why
Frozen moved forward... But it wouldn't be a 2D film as planned.
Ross also took Disney Double Dare You out back, an animation studio (or was it going to be a mere label?) that was going to specialize in spooky, more horror-themed stories with the likes of Guillermo del Toro involved... Oooooh how awesome that would've been! But Ross killed it.
Mars Needs Moms bombing lead to ties being cut with Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers, and probably for the better.
However, a real problem began to emerge in mid-2010, when
John Carter of Mars moved forward. The Andrew Stanton-directed epic based on the influential Edgar Rice Burroughs books was a massive risk, but Cook saw potential in it back in 2007. It was the very book series that influenced the likes of
Star Wars and several other iconic sci-fi/fantasy stories, it was from an acclaimed Pixar filmmaker, and it promised big scale thrills and a possible franchise.
However, the budget spiraled out of control under Rich Ross, when the film finally began production. The budget would be $250 million... $250 million! Any wise executive dealing with the aftermath of films that cost $150-225 million flopping would've worked very hard to keep the budget for
John Carter of Mars under control no matter what. Reportedly Stanton was in over his head when directing his first live-action picture, but I'm not getting into that, all I'm going to say is this... A wise or more seasoned executive would've tried to really keep things under control. If Stanton was indeed not ready, he should've had smart and
experienced executives keeping him in line. Ross was anything but experienced to run a film studio, and this was the first big project he truly oversaw...
Instead, the production ended up being something of a mess. A big mistake was in the making...
But then the marketing executives seemed to interfere,
John Carter of Mars’ title lost the “
Of Mars”. They'll say Stanton himself had it removed because he felt the film was more of an origin story, but that doesn't line up. The film ends with the title
John Carter showing up for a second time, and
Of Mars fading in under it. Plus, rumor has it that the marketing people argued "
Of Mars" didn’t test well and that
Mars Needs Moms flopping would’ve effected the film if it had that title. Up until 2011, it bore the title
John Carter of Mars. I don't know, what story do you believe? The execs being nut jobs sounds more feasible to me.
Its trailers failed to mention the Edgar Rice Burroughs connections, or Andrew Stanton’s Pixar pedigree. The film looked like a
Star Wars knock-off mixed with
Avatar and
Prince of Persia. A lot of people don't know that the titular hero came first in 1912. How did Disney marketing let that all happen? Some article with a source who is identified as an unnamed Disney "marketing mole" will tell you that it was truly all Andrew Stanton's fault and that he controlled the marketing and that he made the Disney marketing head cry in an argument, yadda yadda yadda. Other stories say it was nasty studio politics, and that Ross and his cronies intended to kill Stanton's film, writing it off as spillover from the Dick Cook era that was one long, proverbial "rip the band-aid" moment.
Whatever happened, the marketing started out as a bust and continued to be a bust...
The Lone Ranger ran into issues the same year
John Carter's marketing kicked up, its budget also skyrocketed to $250 million! Again, why the hell would you spend $150 million alone on a film based on
The Lone Ranger? A property that probably isn’t well-known amongst 15-35yo moviegoing audiences and possibly their parents even. Plus the film, despite ending up carrying a PG-13, would be pretty violent and perhaps be too weird for some audiences out there. Westerns are also not guaranteed smashes overseas... But again, what could possibly go wrong? It’s from the director and producer team of the
Pirates trilogy, has Johnny Depp playing an eccentric character, and action!
By 2011,
Pirates was waning in the US. The fourth installment dipped in ticket sales, grossing significantly less than the first installment even! Worldwide, it didn't matter, it was the biggest one overseas, probably thanks to the 3D/IMAX 3D uptick.
Production halted on
The Lone Ranger in order for the studio to keep the budget in check... By in check they meant reducing it by $25 million.
The Lone Ranger would cost $225 million!
Meanwhile,
Maleficent began to gain traction. That would be greenlit with a $180 million budget. Seemed more reasonable, given the success of
Alice in Wonderland and given the fact that Walt Disney’s classic
Sleeping Beauty is iconic and beloved.
In mid-2011, Ross greenlit one peculiar production. One that seemed to fall in line with his “chase the young boy audience” mentality: A science fiction script by Damon Lindelof, who worked on LOST and would later write
Prometheus and
Star Trek Into Darkness. They greenlit it, and $190 million was eventually thrown at it.
What could possibly go wrong? Even after
G-Force,
Prince of Persia, and
Sorcerer's Apprentice flopped... Even after big sci-fi action flick
TRON: Legacy didn’t quite post the numbers they wanted...
Lindelof’s script would get a director and co-writer in Brad Bird the Pixar mastermind who directed
The Incredibles and
Ratatouille, and also the highly successful
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol for Paramount. Bird was named director in early 2012. The picture became
Tomorrowland, a sci-fi tale that was more focused on ideas and themes rather than big action and spectacle...
What could possibly go wrong?
Spring 2012...
John Carter bombed at the box office thanks to the awful marketing campaign, and good overseas grosses couldn’t save it. The picture had to have made around $500 million in order to break even! A ridiculous amount to expect for a ton of films really, even some tentpoles! Had Stanton's space epic cost less than $150 million, it wouldn't have been much of a less. $284 million worldwide isn't terrible. If the film had cost $125 million, with all its big sets and monsters and fx spectacle, $284 million would've been okay. Maybe not franchise-starter good, but it wouldn't be much of a loss. At least it would've doubled the $125 million budget...
(I'm aware of
John Carter of Mars' long history in Hollywood. Many movie attempts were made, and maybe those "development" costs carried over onto Disney's film, similar to how
Tangled's development costs ended up making that budget balloon to $260 million!)
So now they were left with two risky live-action "tentpoles", one carried a $225 million budget and had a stigma attached to it already, the other would be $190 million. Rich Ross was ousted as Chairman, replacing him was experienced veteran Alan Horn. Would he turn the ship around and right the wrongs?
As he was coming in, the Marvel acquisition under Dick Cook was beginning to pay off dearly.
The Avengers, the first Marvel Studios film released by Walt Disney Pictures, grossed $600 million+ domestically and $1.5 billion worldwide in the summer of 2012. Every following Marvel film was huge and highly profitable...
What was next for Disney and big budget live-action pictures? A non-risk,
Oz The Great and Powerful. It cost $225 million price tag, opened spectacularly, had okay legs, did good overseas, it doubled its budget. That was in spring 2013. A sequel is in development...
The Lone Ranger came next and crashed in summer 2013. It had a poor opening and very poor legs, its aggressive marketing campaign failed to sell it and it didn’t really catch on overseas. Did the marketing department even try? Or did they not think it would do good from the get-go? Maybe they assumed "it'll bomb, so let's see if we can get it to make as much as it can."
Maleficent then came about in summer 2014 and was big, making over $200 million domestically and $700 million worldwide. More films like it were greenlit. It was clear that a money tree was in these live-action reimaginings of Disney animated classics. Take an iconic Disney animated classic, do it in live-action with a cast that the BuzzFeed crowd approves of, and boom!
Cinderella continued this streak this past spring. It’s made over $500 million worldwide.
So...
Tomorrowland...
$190 million budget, original story, has the theme park connection, it could've been something of a modest hit. I'm going to jump the gun just yet. Maybe some freakish thing will happen and will get the film into the black, I don't know. $32 million isn't technically awful, and it did get a small Memorial Day boost yesterday, maybe it'll have legs. Maybe not. It has a middling "B" CinemaScore grade, but then again, so did
Prince of Persia and that made 3x its 3-day gross. No PG films are out until
Inside Out in mid-June, and if
Tomorrowland gets traction before it comes out, it could continue to burn slowly before it wraps up. If
Tomorrowland follows a similar pattern, it'll make at least $96 million domestically. Worldwide is currently up in the air. It opened soft in European territories, but it could surprise next weekend in China and other markets.
I still want to wait and see. The press is oddly a mixed bag, there's a lot of snarky articles but there are articles that are immediately rushing to defend the film. Hooray for integrity!
What went wrong? Trailers didn't sell it, plain and simple.
Or did they?
$32 million on opening weekend wouldn't be bad for another movie. Good, even. The problem is,
Tomorrowland cost $190 million to make.
Did it really need to cost that much, though?
I don't know about you, but I saw the film and it did not look or feel like a $190 million movie to me. It shouldn't have been expected to make 2x its budget from the get-go... $380 million worldwide.
What I saw was a smaller-scale adventure comedy/drama that was certainly science fiction, but it wasn't a big fantasy film or massive adventure. The trailers made it seem like the film was going to be this big boom-bang-pow adventure set in a dazzling retro-futuristic city, and the trailers were light on the characters themselves. Both George Clooney and Britt Robertson's characters, Frank Walker and Casey Newton respectively. They didn't even need to show Raffey Cassidy's character Athena. What would've happened had the trailers focused more on them and not the city/cool effects/action?
We visit Tomorrowland roughly three times. In the beginning Walker experiences a bit of it as a kid, then the scene abruptly cuts off. Then Casey grabs the pin, goes to a field out in the woods, and explores it for maybe less than five minutes. The pin timer expires, she's back in the real world. The rest of the film, up until the third act, is Casey journeying to find answers, ultimately teaming her up with Athena and then Walker. There's a set-piece involving a shop full of geeky cool things, with some booms and bangs, but that's about it. The enemies are Disney-style audio-animatronics, there are a few gadgets and stuff here and there...
The last third finally takes us to the titular city, but it's anything but lively and dazzling. It's rundown, dilapidated, post-apocalyptic. We see some cool stuff here and there, and we get a setpiece that doesn't involve too many booms and bangs. No flying around the city, no big CG creature or alien threat to stop, no audio-animatronic war. There's a fight, two robots, a portal, the thing they have to stop, but it's nothing crazy. I've seen the same stuff in films that cost $100-120 million, and it was bigger in those films. On top of all that, it has a message that’s very much front-and-center and one that's currently troubled and dividing audiences and critics alike, it comments on the state of the world today, and it’s through and through a science fiction film...
This should've costed $90 million minimum, not $190 million.
Yes, marketing is an issue with these live-action pictures. Yes, them being hard sells is an issue with these live-action pictures...
But so is Disney...
Or whoever is throwing all that money into these pictures...
G-Force didn’t need to cost $150 million, even with tons of effects or flash.
Prince of Persia didn't need to cost $200 million.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice should’ve costed less than $100 million.
John Carter of Mars' budget shouldn't have ballooned to anywhere near $150 million.
The Lone Ranger shouldn't have costed anywhere near $225 million, or $125 million even...
It is and was certainly bold of Disney to spend so much on all of these risky films, films that probably weren’t meant to be the kinds of films that gross over $500 million worldwide and launch franchises. To expect that of something original is a bit ridiculous, wouldn't you say? I mean, it's already quite enough when it's for something that's pretty much guaranteed to strike gold!
If Tomorrowland had cost $120 million tops, its box office uphill climb wouldn’t be so massive. The same goes for The Lone Ranger. A $100 million Lone Ranger would’ve been a success, since the film did ultimately make $260 million in the end, that’s more than 2 1/2 times a $100 million budget. A $150 million-costing John Carter still would’ve flopped with $284 million worldwide, but the write-down wouldn’t be as massive. A $150 million Prince of Persia would’ve done okay with $336 million worldwide.
The problem is, once again, Disney going for excess with budgets...
I feel that this is what ultimately hurt these “tentpole” films, and it’s too early to say what Tomorrowland will end up being, be it a flop or a modest success or hit even, but still... It cost too much to make.
Did Disney perhaps get some sort of overconfidence after the blockbusting trio of Pirates, National Treasure, and Narnia? Disney can certainly afford the losses of those films, for they have their own animation studio, Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm alongside theme parks and consumer products and merchandise, and every other asset from ABC to ESPN...
The problem is, when something doesn’t do well, the current Disney seems to cease to try, try, try again...
Polar opposite of what Walt Disney did. Walt soldiered on with crazy experiments and risks despite being low on money at many times in his life... Even when he was in debt! You owe how many millions to the bank circa 1948? That's okay, make an animated feature that's not a package anthology film, get into live-action, film nature documentary short films, get into TV... Oh, and now that we've recouped, it's the early 1950s now, let's... Build a theme park!
Disney has money pits everywhere, they have no excuse.
Should they continue with original, ambitious live-action pictures, they ought to consider the budgets and scale them down. Disney likes to scale things down, so why don't they scale down the budgets of these films? Why don't they save the $150-250 million budgets for the stuff that's obviously going to break even? You know... Marvel films and
Star Wars chapters?
Disney live-action’s slate is mostly just reimaginings of Disney animated classics. Very few offbeat
Tomorrowland or
John Carter-esque projects are on the slate, outside of
The BFG and maybe
The Finest Hours.
The former is a Steven Spielberg production, his first for Disney that isn't a Touchstone picture, and it's about giants. I can imagine that it could cost less than $120 million, $100 million even. The only Roald Dahl films to score are the two films based on his
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The budget has already been determined, I reckon, and I hope it isn't too big. It's July 1, 2016 release is arguably not too, too breathable, but we'll see what happens...
The Finest Hours? I honestly have no idea how much it'll cost. It's based on a book that's based on something that actually happened in 1952, two T2 tankers were effected by a nor'easter off of Cape Cod. Storms, shipwrecks... I can see it costing less than $100 million. It originally held an October 2015 release, but Disney pushed it to January 2016. It's probably going to be one of those "more for the adults only" films, it doesn't sound like a family film, and when I saw the Disney name on it at the CinemaCon presentation, I was shocked. I honestly thought that this would be a Touchstone release...
But what after that? Hopefully
TRON: Ascension moves forward, but that's a sequel and nothing really new, even the
TRON franchise is interesting and far more exciting than the umpteenth reimagining of a Disney animated classic. There's Guillermo del Toro's
Haunted Mansion, which is essentially the Haunted Mansion-inspired film we deserve, and a more horror-centric one would certainly be fresh and new, but is that moving forward? Or is it going to move forward?
What of recent acquisitions and projects like
Goblins?
Floors?
In The Land of Imagined Things?
A Wrinkle in Time? I assume the likes of
Matched,
Tribyville,
Terra Incognita, and
The Stuff of Legend aren't going to happen at this point.
Actually... It's worth noting that inbetween all those big films made from PIRATES to now, you had a lot of little scale films, some of which did well and others didn’t. Films like
Bridge to Terabithia,
Bedtime Stories, Touchstone films like
Real Steel and
Need for Speed,
The Odd Life of Timothy Green,
Alexander and the Terrible Day,
Into the Woods, Spielberg's upcoming Touchstone release
Bridge of Spies...
I won't exactly comment on Disney's spending on the "hit" pictures, though I can see films like
Captain America: The Winter Soldier being $120 million-costing films, not films costing more than $170 million. At least Marvel tries to avoid the big 2-0-0 with their non-
Avengers/
Iron Man films, all of the Phase 2 films in that category cost $170 million to make. Even
Guardians of the Galaxy! Hey,
John Carter of Mars and
The Lone Ranger and
Tomorrowland cost more than that fx heavy film that's full of alien planets and creatures!
Basically, yes, Disney ought to watch the budgets on the live-action pictures from now on. Instead of sending ambitious, cool concepts like
Tomorrowland to the garbage airlock, they should think of the money that goes into these things and what kind of box office potential these films will have. Especially in a day and age where films have a short time to breathe in theaters, must dash right out of the gate, and do good business before the right-around-the-corner home media release.
I wouldn’t greenlight a script like
Tomorrowland with a $190 million budget in mind. I’d shoot for $120 million tops, $100 million even... Perhaps when
Tomorrowland was greenlit, Ross and his cronies didn’t know much about its story. Damon Lindelof, who was brought in to do a sci-fi script, likes to treat things like a “mystery box”. Maybe they just greenlit it thinking “It’s a big sci-fi story and it’ll get young boys interested. $190 million!”
But why do that? I’d want to read the script first, get an idea of the size and scope of the picture, its themes, its ideas...
Similarly, I wouldn’t even think of giving
The Lone Ranger a budget anywhere near $150 million. I would tell Mr. Verbinski that building steam locomotives isn’t necessary, find a more cost-effective way and still make the train scenes convincing!
