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The Big Picture

Patrick Goldstein on the collision of entertainment, media and pop culture

Why everyone lies about their movie's budget

12:49 PM PT, Jan 5 2009

I was at PEN USA's annual Literary Awards Festival a few weeks ago, having a great time, hobnobbing with all sorts of illustrious writers, when I ran into "There Will Be Blood's" writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who was there to accept an award for his film script. A huge fan of his work, I told him how much I'd liked his movie. He nodded and shyly smiled, and I thought he might say something like, "Oh, geez, thanks for the compliment." What he really said was: "In that story you did, you got the budget wrong."

If I actually believed in New Year's resolutions, I'd happily promise to never write about a movie's budget ever again -- all it does is cause pain and misery, both for the press, which is always being spun by studio executives and producers, and for the filmmakers, who are always convinced that clueless reporters and columnists are wildly inflating their movie budgets. (It is safe to say that no one in the history of Hollywood has ever complained about the press underestimating the cost of his or her movie.)

To be fair, Anderson wasn't all that angry. We went on to have a perfectly amiable conversation. But I'm sure he was unhappy, since when I made reference to his budget, which I said was in the vicinity of $45 million, I was making the point that his movie -- a dark, intense historical drama -- cost so much (along with the marketing outlays of Paramount Vantage's Oscar campaign) that it could never possibly make a decent profit.

The problem that journalists have in reporting about movie budgets is that nearly everyone they ask about a movie's budget tends to -- how do I put this nicely -- offer a whopper of an untruth. In other words, shock of all shocks, people in Hollywood lie. The studio chief who made the movie gives you a low-ball number. The head of a rival studio, eager to make a competitor look bad, gives you a wildly inflated number. Most journalists have reported that Baz Luhrmann's recent film, "Australia," cost $130 million. 20th Century Fox insists that it cost less, saying it received a hefty subsidy from the Australian government, knocking $30 or so million off that figure. But every rival studio chief I spoke to about the film said with great authority, as if they'd seen a host of internal Fox documents, that the film cost $170 or $180 or $200 million, just to throw out the three different figures I got from three different executives.

What's a reporter to do? Who tells the biggest whoppers? And how does one reporter use triangulation to figure out the real budget number? Keep reading:

I'm old-fashioned about reporting budget numbers. I like to go to the source. In other words, I try not to report a number unless I've gotten it from a top executive at the studio (or financing company) that made the picture or a producer or some other high-level member of the production team. You'd think this would work out pretty smoothly, but even then, I've discovered that budget numbers are a slippery business.

My colleague John Horn, who is something of an expert on movie budgets, since he is always writing about film profitability, reminded me of the legendary example of funny numbers involving Jeffrey Katzenberg and his DreamWorks Animation films. When "Shrek 2" was being released, Katzenberg (like most studio execs) was eager to make the film look as profitable as possible, so he didn't stop reporters from believing his movie cost a pittance. That's why Newsweek, in 2004, reported that the film's stars Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz "got $10 million each to reprise their characters, which accounted for almost half the film's modest $70 million budget." But after DreamWorks Animation went public, its budget figures suddenly soared dramatically, with the company acknowledging that the original "Shrek" cost closer to $130 million, with its and other DreamWorks sequels costing "15 to 30% higher" than that.

Once burned, twice shy, which is why the showbiz media has a healthy skepticism about budgetary information from studio executives. Sometimes you get the feeling that you could ask five people who worked on a film to tell you the budget -- and you'd get five different answers. When I was writing about the unknown screenwriter who'd penned Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" last month, I reported that the movie (co-financed by Warners and Village Roadshow) cost $35 million. Warners immediately called to complain, saying my number was totally wrong. Rob Lorenz, a delightful guy who's one of the producers of the film -- and has worked with Eastwood for years -- asked how I could have possibly gotten such a wrong figure. Actually, I told him, I got the budget figure from Bill Gerber, who -- ahem -- was the other producer of the film, with Lorenz and Eastwood. Since Gerber had once been a head of production at Warners, I figured he knew what he was talking about. Lorenz told me the film cost closer to $25 million, so I amended the figure, saying the film cost "less than $30 million."

This happens all the time. I wrote in a recent post that Sam Mendes' "Revolutionary Road," a Paramount film produced by DreamWorks, cost $45 million. I didn't make up the number -- it's what a top executive at Paramount (which then owned DreamWorks) told me the film cost. As soon as the story ran, Stacey Snider, who runs DreamWorks, e-mailed me to say the film only cost $35 million. It seems unlikely that Paramount would inflate the cost of a film it financed and distributed, since if "Revolutionary Road" fails to find an audience, it will look like an ever bigger flop if it cost $45 million instead of $35 million. But I also trust Snider, who has a better track record than most studio chiefs in offering honest numbers. So what does the movie cost? Let's just say -- that's a work in progress.

As you can see, assessing movie budgets is a skill that relies on instinct as much as actual reporting. Horn uses something akin to triangulation, i.e. the art of measuring from three different points of reference, the epicenter being where those lines intersect. As he puts it: "Ask three people without axes to grind, or reasons to lie, what a movie's budget is, and the average of those numbers can be a close approximation of the film's true cost."

When Horn was reporting on the budget of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" for his Word of Mouth column, he asked two executives "close to Paramount" what the film cost. One said $175 million. Another said $185 million. Horn ran the lower figure. Even so, the studio complained, saying that while the film's initial budget was in fact $175 million, incentives from Canada and Louisiana -- where much of the film was shot -- reduced the actual cost to $150 million. The Times published a clarification to explain why our original budget number was off the mark.

But right around the time that Paramount was upset that our "Benjamin Button" number was too high, I found myself on the phone with a studio boss who complained that our "Button" number was too low, saying, "You guys are so gullible. That movie cost at least $200 million." I guess that makes us damned if we do, damned if we don't. It makes for a frustrating experience all around. As a baseball junkie, I take pleasure in the sanctity of numbers. You know that at the end of game you can accurately calculate every player's batting average, based solely on his performance. Fudging isn't allowed. If a player's hitting .315, he's hitting .315. If he goes 0-for-4 in the next game, his batting average goes down. No explanation, no exception.

But movie budgets, like everything else about the business, are never black and white. In Hollywood, the numbers are a lot like the truth -- they are always subject to interpretation.

Seven Pounds Tops Stinkers

In a New York/Vulture poll of 57 film critics, Gabriele Muccino and Will Smith's Seven Pounds has been named the worst film of 2008. Perhaps now that Seven Pounds has been fully reviled and discredited it's okay to allow people to check out this mock poster, although please understand that it's a complete spoiler.

Here's a list of all the critics polled or quoted, along with their own lists of the year's worst.

The other worst-of-the-year picks, going from tenth-worst to second-worst, is as follows: (10) Diane English's The Women; (9) Clint Eastwood's Changeling; ( Frank Miller's The Spirit; (7) M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening; (6) Baz Luhrman's Australia; (5) The Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer; (4) Michael Haneke's Funny Games; (3) Jon Avnet's 88 Minutes; and (2) Mike Myers' The Love Guru.

Here's New Yorker critic David Denby on the reasoning behind his choosing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the year's worst: "Director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth have taken a playful early story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and literalized and solemnized it to death. It's a work of extraordinary craftsmanship devoted to an idea that's dramatically inert. When Brad Pitt finally grows young enough to look like his actual age, he doesn't have any memories of the ardency or anxiety of youth but only relief that he's no longer a crotchety old man. Even as a young blade, he's an old fart. It just doesn't work. That people can find serious ideas about death and mortality in it suggests the power of weirdness to inspire fancy sentiment."

Ballots for the Vulture critics' poll were collected in three ways. Many critics responded to our requests with lists of their worst movies of the year. Many other critics had already published such lists. Finally, for critics who did not respond telling us they did not want to participate, or were unreachable, we combed through their 2008 reviews to find their most memorable pan.

Every mention of a film earned that film one point, with a bonus point awarded if a critic named the film the absolute worst of the year.

1. Ballots received from individual critics

Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Synecdoche, New York

Lane Brown, Vulture
Seven Pounds

Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times
Australia
Changeling
Jumper
The Other Boleyn Girl
Then She Found Me

Carina Chocano, formerly of the Los Angeles Times
1. Speed Racer. Was any other movie of the year as likely to provoke grand mal seizures in viewers while simultaneously putting them to sleep? The Wachowski brothers tried to liven things up by detaching the talking heads from their respective necks and tossing them around the screen. The urge was shared.
2. The Spirit. Frank Miller has been hinting at the depths of his talent for some time now with his contributions to Sin City and 300. As the man entirely responsible for the string of exhausted noir clichés that is The Spirit, he shows that he's capable of making a terrible, nonsensical movie all on his own.
3. 88 Minutes. Al Pacino in a spray tan and bouffant tries to outlive a serial killer's promise to kill him in 88 minutes. Nobody roots for him.
4. The Air I Breathe. A histrionic, Chinese-proverb-based allegory that assigns four emotions to four characters whose lives randomly intersect over a couple of days. As believable as it sounds.
5. The Happening. An airborne toxin blocks the human instinct for self-preservation, which immediately results in an epidemic of mass suicide. Why not just stop using seat belts?
6. Fool's Gold. Kate Hudson wisely dumps Matthew McConaughey in this third-rate Romancing the Stone knockoff, then spends the rest of the movie feeling irresistibly drawn to him. in this, she is on her own.
7. Blindness. Julianne Moore leads the blind after a blindness epidemic hits an unnamed city and the sightless are summarily quarantined. Live the airless, whinging claustrophobia.
8. What Happens in Vegas… Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher as an uptight girl and a laid-back guy who meet, get drunk and get married in Vegas, then find themselves legally bound to stick it out. Knocked Up meets Judge Judy.
9. Good Luck Chuck. Every girl Dane Cook sleeps with ends up marrying the next guy she meets. There's something funny in that premise but, whatever it is, Good Luck Chuck steers clear of it.
10. The Love Guru. Mike Myers swaps the right to make fun of self-help gurus for a Deepak Chopra cameo. The catchphrase and scene of elephant love don't make up for the missed opportunity.

David Denby, The New Yorker
It has to be The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Fincher and writer Eric Roth have taken a playful early story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and literalized and solemnized it to death. It's a work of extraordinary craftsmanship devoted to an idea that's dramatically inert. When Brad Pitt finally grows young enough to look like his actual age, he doesn't have any memories of the ardency or anxiety of youth but only relief that he's no longer a crotchety old man. Even as a young blade, he's an old fart. It just doesn't work. That people can find serious ideas about death and mortality in it suggests the power of weirdness to inspire fancy sentiment.

Bilge Ebiri, New York
1. 88 Minutes
One of the absolute worst of the decade, and an absolute waste of a cast.
Australia
The Air I Breathe
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Hounddog
Towelhead

David Edelstein, New York
Well, I missed The Love Guru, and I think my list should have an asterisk on that count. But, in 1-10 order:
Funny Games (so not nice he made it twice)
Australia
The Reader
Nothing But the Truth
Seven Pounds
W.
Mamma Mia!
88 Minutes
Delgo
Changeling

Mark Graham, Vulture
1. Funny Games
2. Revolutionary Road
3. Max Payne
4. The Love Guru
5. The Spirit

Logan Hill, New York
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Stephen Holden, New York Times
Australia
Good
Henry Poole Is Here
Mary
The Mummy: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Eric Kohn, New York Press
1. The Spirit
2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
3. Changeling
4. X-Files: I Want to Believe
5. Quantum of Solace
6. Mirrors
7. Adam Resurrected
8. Body of Lies
9. Step Brothers
10. The Happening

Dan Kois, Vulture/Washington Post
Bedtime Stories
Blindness
Changeling
Four Christmases
The Spirit
Twilight
The Wackness

Kevin Lee, Shooting Down Pictures
When Dante penned Inferno, he neglected to describe the circle of Hell where one is forced to watch cherished elements from one's youth debauched into a Sundance-formula indie movie. As someone who loves the golden era of Gotham hip-hop circa '94, when Nas and Wu-Tang Clan were taking rap virtuosity to new heights, I found The Wackness an appalling attempt to evoke this enthusiasm. The Wackness reduces hip-hop to sonic wallpaper decorating a poor little rich kid's counter-culture posturing, punctuated with hindsight name-checking. ("Yo, what's that dope sound you pumping?" "His name is Notorious B.I.G. He's the next big thing, yo!") Add Ben Kingsley aping Harvey Keitel while pulling a phone-booth sex stunt with one half of the Olsen twigs, and you have a movie that more than lives up to its title.

Nathan Lee, New York Times
1. Rachel Getting Married
Insufferable bobo hysteria.
2. The Wrestler
Yes, Rourke is amazing. Too bad everything else is pretentious, derivative, cliché, and condescending.
3. Revolutionary Road
OMG, the American suburbs of the fifties were such a soul-crushing, conformist hell! Zzzzz…
4. Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild
Don't let the generic title fool you: This is the worst gay sequel ever.

Dennis Lim, New York Times
It's tough to pick worst movies - especially now that I tend to just avoid movies I don't have to write about and suspect I won't like - but I guess I'll nominate Revolutionary Road, certainly the most irritating and fraudulent film I saw last year.

Karina Longworth, spout.com
I'm going to go with Changeling. You can excerpt from my "review" if you like.

Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
Seven Pounds is my slam dunk.

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe
In order of foulness:
88 Minutes
What Happens in Vegas
Speed Racer
In the Name of the King
Hottie and the Nottie
The Love Guru
The Happening
Prom Night
10,000 BC
Jumper

Matt Zoller Seitz, The House Next Door
1. Strange Wilderness. This inexplicably self-satisfied non-movie was half-assed even by stoner-comedy standards, and it transformed its versatile, self-deprecating star, Steve Zahn, into a snide boor.
2. Doomsday. This trashy sci-fi programmer has its defenders - such movies invariably do - but what's to defend? There isn't an image, character, situation, or gag that isn't pilfered from an earlier, better movie, and director Neil Marshall - whose previous film, The Descent, is a near-classic of modern horror - doesn't transform the borrowings into anything distinctive. The difference between this movie and its key inspirations - 28 Days Later, Escape From New York, and The Road Warrior - is the difference between raw meat and Hot Pockets.
3. Hancock. The year's most frustrating studio blockbuster, it contains the germs of three, maybe four idiosyncratic and moving fantasy epics, but lacks the cojones to develop any of them past the deal memo stage. The most vexing is the hero's Candyman-like backstory as a victim of racist violence; to bury that detail in a couple of tossed-off lines of dialogue is the most cowardly of the film's many copouts.
4. Badland. Much as I'm inclined to resist beating up on super-ambitious, no-budget labors of love, this turgid, 160-minute melodrama - about a PTSD-afflicted soldier who murders his wife and two of their children, then fantasizes going on the run with his surviving daughter and starting a new romance with a smokin' hot coffee-shop owner - merits a Billy Batts-in-Goodfellas-style stomping. Tone-deaf indulgences like this give American independent film a bad name.

Dana Stevens, Slate
1. The Love Guru
2. Drillbit Taylor
3. Seven Pounds
4. Jumper
5. Speed Racer

Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun
Was 10,000 BC this year? If not, could we fit it in by going by the Hebraic or Eastern Orthodox calendars?
Then there was Punisher: War Zone. An excruciating blend of the incompetent and the would-be hip, but just think what reviews it would have gotten if it had co-starred Heath Ledger! Of course, although The Dark Knight had a modicum of craft and professional turns from Caine and Freeman and a scary (though overrated) performance by Ledger, my idea of film-critic hell this summer was watching it and Mamma Mia! virtually back to back.
And Seven Pounds, whose only virtue was the title that begged every wisecracker watching the trailer to produce the answer to "seven pounds of what?"

Sara Vilkomerson, New York Observer
1. Seven Pounds
2. The Women
3. Jumper
4. Speed Racer / The Happening / Postal (tie)

Pete Vonder Haar, Film Threat
1. Fool's Gold. McConaughey mugs his way through yet another leading role, playing Finn as Sahara's Dirk Pitt minus the SEAL training and a few million brain cells.
2. Vantage Point. The latest and dumbest in a long line of political thrillers.
3. Drillbit Taylor. As a bully movie, it falls far short of such genre classics as Three O'Clock High and The Karate Kid and barely rates mention alongside mediocre efforts like Lucas or … The Next Karate Kid.
4. Street Kings. If you make it through the first twenty minutes of this and still don't know who the bad guys will end up being and how everything will end, I can only offer my condolences, because obviously not all your dogs are barking.
5. 88 Minutes. One small step for bad filmmaking and one giant leap for the increasing insignificance of the former Michael Corleone.
6. What Happens in Vegas… During the screening, I tried to come up with as many synonyms for the word "excruciating" as I could. I gave up around ten.
7. You Don't Mess With the Zohan. There are laughs, but even Dorf on Golf had its moments.
8. Twilight. Stephanie Meyer's ponderous salute to teen abstinence and patriarchal supremacy marks the endgame for what has been a decades-long castration of the vampire genre.
9. Marley & Me. Enough to make one sympathize with that cougar from Where the Red Fern Grows.
10. Sex and the City. Otherwise sane women seemed perfectly willing to identify with someone whose biggest problem was whether or not to accept the gift of a million dollar penthouse from their boyfriend. Maybe society truly is doomed.

Armond White, New York Press
For me, the year's worst is a toss-up: The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire and Wall-E. This trifecta celebrates the reign of pessimism, the ubiquity of television, and the end of culture.

Stephanie Zacharek, Salon
I'm torn between The Love Guru, which contains one genuinely funny joke (the use of Mariska Hargitay's name as a blessing) and then proceeds to run even that into the ground, and Seven Pounds, in which organ donor Will Smith auditions candidates to decide who should get his various body parts, based on who's been naughty and who's been nice. Two different kinds of bad.

2. Ballots collected from already-published lists

Melissa Anderson, Time Out
Rachel Getting Married

Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle
Repo! The Genetic Opera

Ty Burr, Boston Globe
1. Towelhead
2. The Happening
3. Baby Mama
4. Speed Racer
5. The Hottie and the Nottie

Tom Charity, CNN
1. Funny Games
2. The Spirit
3. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
4. Eagle Eye
5. Australia
6. Fool's Gold
7. Seven Pounds
8. 88 Minutes
9. What Happens in Vegas...
10. The X-Files: I Want to Believe

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Speed Racer
The Happening
88 Minutes
The Love Guru
Meet Dave
Max Payne
The Happening
The Spirit

David Fear, Time Out
Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
1. Speed Racer
2. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
3. Patti Smith: Dream of Life
4. Australia
5. Hounddog

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
1. Australia
2. RocknRolla
3. Untraceable
4. The Strangers
5. Mother of Tears
6. Pride and Glory
7. Get Smart
8. Drillbit Taylor
9. Vantage Point
10. Made of Honor

Lou Lumenick, New York Post
88 Minutes

Noel Murray, The AV Club
The Hottie & The Nottie

Christopher Orr, The New Republic
Funny Games
Seven Pounds
Changeling
Hancock
The Happening
The Day the Earth Stood Still

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post
Punisher: War Zone

Keith Phipps, The A.V. Club
Mad Money

Claudia Puig, USA Today
The Happening
Valkyrie

Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club
Adam Resurrected

Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer
Australia
The Love Guru
My Blueberry Nights
The Other Boleyn Girl
The Strangers

Rex Reed, New York Observer
1. Synecdoche, New York
2. Burn After Reading
3. Paranoid Park
4. Funny Games
5. August
6. Mamma Mia!
7. Sex and the City
8. Speed Racer
9. Choke
10. Four Christmases
11. My Blueberry Nights, Happy-Go-Lucky, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Wackness, Pineapple Express, Australia, Ghost Town

Tasha Robinson, The AV Club
War, Inc.

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
1. Bangkok Dangerous.
88 Minutes
The Love Guru

Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
1. The Love Guru
2. What Happens in Vegas
3. The Women
4. 10,000 BC
5. 88 Minutes
6. Funny Games
7. Fly Me to the Moon
8. Over Her Dead Body
9. Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
10. You Don't Mess With the Zohan

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out
The Love Guru

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly
1. The Women
2. Seven Pounds
3. 88 Minutes
4. Speed Racer
5. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Scott Tobias, The A.V. Club
Over Her Dead Body

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
1. Quantum of Solace
2. Australia
3. Twilight

3. Ballots created by us based on critics' 2008 reviews

David Ansen, Newsweek
Funny Games
Hancock

Richard Corliss, Time
The Happening

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Tru Loved
"Q. How can you give a one-star rating to a movie you didn't sit through?
A. The rating only applies to the first eight minutes. After that, you're on your own."

Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly
Seven Pounds
"Dispiritingly obvious and phony from top to bottom."

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Funny Games
"Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should."

Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
"Taken together, Sex and the City, Mamma Mia!, and The Women add up to a spectacular trilogy of the inane."

Richard Schickel, Time
What Happens in Vegas…
"Worst-in-breed not only for this year, but very likely in living memory."
The Women
"One of the worst movies I've ever seen."

A.O. Scott, New York Times
Funny Games
Seven Pounds

Thanks to all the critics who participated, whether they knew it or not.

Logo by Everett Bogue; Photos: Getty Images, istockphoto.