UPDATED: With a $300+ Million Budget How Does 'Avatar' Make Its Money Back?
That's a lot of money
Photo: Art Streiber for TIME
UPDATE: Josh Quittner, author of the TIME article discussed in this post, commented below saying the $300 million number in his article is an error and it should have read $200 million. I have left the end of this post as it was before, but what is said there no longer really applies to Avatar as a result of this news.
TIME has posted a three-page feature article headlined "3-D: The Future of Movies" taking a look at the future of 3-D movies with an emphasis on Digital 3-D and several upcoming 3-D features such as Monsters vs. Aliens and the new 3-D-ified versions of Toy Story, but there is a lot of talk about James Cameron's hotly anticipated holiday 2009 release Avatar which is expected to revolutionize the format.
Reading the article you will learn facts about making films in 3-D such as how the computational power of DreamWorks' render farm puts it roughly among the 15 fastest supercomputers on the planet, how making a film 3-D adds about 15% to its cost and how digital 3-D movies usually gross at least three times as much as their flat-world counterparts.
The piece looks at the history of 3-D leading up to today and ends with a look at the future with a focus on Cameron's Avatar, a film in which the author of the TIME piece, Josh Quittner, got a look at and brings the following nuggets of information:
Cameron's Avatar, due in December, could be the thing that forces theaters to convert to digital. Spielberg predicts it will be the biggest 3-D live-action film ever. More than a thousand people have worked on it, at a cost in excess of $300 million, and it represents digital filmmaking's bleeding edge. Cameron wrote the treatment for it in 1995 as a way to push his digital-production company to its limits. ("We can't do this," he recalled his crew saying. "We'll die.") He worked for years to build the tools he needed to realize his vision. The movie pioneers two unrelated technologies–e-motion capture, which uses images from tiny cameras rigged to actors' heads to replicate their expressions, and digital 3-D.
Avatar is filmed in the old "Spruce Goose" hangar, the 16,000-sq.-ft. space where Howard Hughes built his wooden airplane. The film is set in the future, and most of the action takes place on a mythical planet, Pandora. The actors work in an empty studio; Pandora's lush jungle-aquatic environment is computer-generated in New Zealand by Jackson's special-effects company, Weta Digital, and added later.
I couldn't tell what was real and what was animated–even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn't possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora were real.
Cameron wasn't surprised. One theory, he says, is that 3-D viewing "is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2-D viewing doesn't." His own theory is that stereoscopic viewing uses more neurons. That's possible. After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out. I was also totally entertained.
If you are like me those descriptions were enough to get you excited for the film and as much as I would like to get an early peek as well it sounds like something that would be amazing to get a first look at the first time you walk into the theaters as only a 3-D trailer could possibly mirror the presentation.
However, the one thing that stands out and smacks you in the face is the mention of a $300+ million budget. What? That is astronomical. As does Peter at SlashFilm, I am assuming this can't include marketing and publicity costs. So how does this film make its money back?
Sure, when the film releases on December 18 in standard theaters and IMAX there will be more 3-D theaters to put it in and IMAX brings in additional monies, but does this mean this film needs to make something like $600 million just to break even? And that's working on a 50/50 split with theater owners and the studio as well as saying it will stick to a $300 million budget. Talking strictly domestic numbers here, that would mean the film would be right up there with Cameron's already all-time top grossing film Titanic. If he were to own the #1 and #2 slots at the all-time box-office it would be quite an amazing accomplishment.
Check out the article for yourself right here it is well worth the read.
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