"If they're gonna be that foolish with their money, then I guess that means we can be foolish with their money. Like spending a bunch of it on a computer-generated cartoon elephant that has nothing to do with the rest of the episode. [a cartoon elephant skips across the screen] Did you see that? Know what that cost? $58,000. I mean, what a waste. It wasn't even that funny. That's $58,000 that could've gone to curing leukemia. Or muscular dystrophy. Or... what does Michael J. Fox have? That."
There are many important aspects to consider when budgeting a project. High-quality sets, lighting, and sound equipment aren't cheap, and all the cast and crew need to be paid fairly and treated humanely to ensure good performances and good graces. But some directors insist that one element deserves far more attention than the rest, and will direct as much money as possible towards making that thing as good as it can be — even if it means cutting corners for the rest of the work or going outside of your budget altogether. It takes Shoot the Money to the extreme by using that one element to really advertise the final product, such as a scene shot on-location at a famous monument or a Celebrity Cameo from an expensive A-lister.
It is possible the cost may not be too outlandish by budgetary standards but will still turn heads because of what the item is, like purchasing 500 Nerf (Brand) guns painted black to fill out a crowd scene. Alternatively the most costly scene may only show up for an extremely brief amount of time or a Deleted Scene, due to rewrites that render the entire sequence cut down. May also be a form of Money Dumb when applied to the production.
Compare and contrast No Budget; a budget-breaking element may result in the rest of the work appearing as if they had no money to begin with. However, if a work was already designed around having No Budget, they may toss their extra money towards something gratuitous just to flaunt their own wealth. May lead to a Troubled Production and/or the work being a Creator Killer if the risks don't lead to big enough rewards. See What Could Have Been for some cut ideas that the director decided weren't worth the expense.
Some aspects that can require more money than the rest of the film:
- A single scene or sequence that requires unique production elements or visual effects, such as an alien world or a Disney Acid Sequence. This is especially true for fully animated sequences, as it requires a separate production team and pipeline.
- A Troubled Production resulting in poor scheduling of the actors or having to rebuild all or part of a set that was already dismantled. CGI has helped alleviate at least some of those issues, though it's still not necessarily cheap and trying to match the previous footage is its own headache.
- Filming on-location in a profitable space, such as a landmark; renting out the space so no tourists interfere while filming will likely necessitate millions of dollars to compensate for the loss in revenue.
- Particularly expensive props, such as a Cool Car, especially if they get destroyed in a fight scene.
- Hiring an All-Star Cast, or even just one actor with a much bigger paycheck than their colleagues.
- Fees to sample a high-demand intellectual property, especially the rights to play a certain song. Even mere seconds of a particularly expensive pop song can send a film's budget to shambles.
- Being forced to feature Product Placement or other demands from sponsors, which may require chunks of the budget to make a non-functioning prototype work as the actual device is still in the design phase. Also if Production Lead Time is long enough to allow the companies behind the product placement to release newer products that supersede the old ones, expensive reshoots or visual effects may be required to replace the older products. Sometimes these contract disputes will be far more destructive than whatever box office they were hoping for.
- In traditional animation, complex character designs that are difficult to animate, which is why Unmoving Plaid, 2D Visuals, 3D Effects, and Off-Model are tropes.
- In computer animation, anything that's flowing, fluid, or flexible, which is why No Flow in CGI is a trope.
In fiction, this may be exaggerated to illustrate a Prima Donna Director's Skewed Priorities. Some shows may even waste the producers' money deliberately (or at least joke about doing it) to take Biting-the-Hand Humor to the extreme.
Please only list examples confirmed by Word of God or within the work itself, not audience speculation on where the budget must have gone.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Carnival Phantasm: Parodied in the first and second episodes' Tiger Dojos. In the first one, Taiga is so excited about the Dojo finally being animated that she goes hog-wild with ultra-fluid movement. This blows so much of the animation budget (325,500 yen in 23 seconds) that in the second episode, she's just black-and-white line art, while Ilya has no intermediate frames.
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: During the production of the series in 2002, Production I.G ended up setting a new record for the highest budget spent on any anime production for its time. Much of the money went towards showing off new animation technologies in 3D Cel Shading, specifically on vehicles such as helicopters, cars, and especially the Tachikomas themselves. The entire series could've just been done in traditional 2D animation, but it was a choice to render the vehicles in 3D and apply lighting filters to make them look 2D.
Comic Books
- An In-Universe example from The Simpsons. Krusty’s attempt at selling a clown-themed spy show blows most of its budget on a pair of working clown shoes that turn into a helicopter, forcing the show to cut from Krusty flying off to his mission to Krusty explaining the rest of the plot to his bored secretary.
Films — Animation
- Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: A large part of the budget was spent animating Aki's hair, which consisted of 60,000 individually rendered hairs.
- Inside Out: The soft, bubbly texture on the emotions was extraordinarily expensive. At first, Joy was the only one who had it, but after eight months, the animators decided to scrap it because it was becoming ridiculously cost-prohibitive. Unfortunately for them, Pixar head John Lasseter saw the texture on Joy and loved it, declaring "Put that on all the characters!" Ralph Eggleston, the production designer, joked: "You could hear the core technical staff just hitting the ground, the budget falling through the roof."
- In The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a five-second-long gag involving a mule struggling to stay afloat in a river during a rainstorm was called "the most expensive shot in the movie"
due to the added models and water effects. It was deemed Worth It:
- Out of the $290,000 budget for Sita Sings the Blues, $5,000 were spent on music royalties.
- To date, Treasure Planet was the most expensive traditionally animated film in history, with a budget of $140 million. Because it was the first Disney film released with an IMAX release in mind, most of that budget was dedicated to integrating CGI and hand-drawn elements and creating immaculate line-work suitable for such a high-quality screen. The film was a financial failure, only grossing $109 million.
Films — Live-Action
- 24-Hour Party People (2002): In-Universe, as the film is a Very Loosely Based on a True Story account of the history of Factory Records (see the Music section below) that had a series of bad luck with money. We see producer Martin Hannet run up his bill by taking his sweet time recording Joy Division' debut album, New Order's "Blue Monday" single costing more to print than its sales price and then selling a record amount of copies all at a loss, the money sink of the Hacienda night club first being empty most nights only to later be taken over by a crowd that doesn't buy drinks, the Troubled Production of Happy Mondays' second album and Tony Wilson buying a ridiculously expensive designer conference table for their office.
- American Graffiti was made on a low budget ($777,000 in 1973 money) and more than a tenth of that ($80,000) was spent on music licensing.
- The Beach: $20 million out of the film’s $50 million budget went to Leonardo DiCaprio’s salary.
- Producer Joel Silver was adamant in hiring Dennis Miller for the lead of Bordello of Blood. Miller, who had no interest in acting, claimed he'd do it for a million dollars. Silver accepted and thus Miller's salary became 40% of the movie's $2.5 million budget. Silver accomplished this by cutting $750k from the movie's effects budget, which was a drawback in a movie about vampires.
- The Bonfire of the Vanities second unit director Eric Schwab spent $80,000 on a five-camera shot of a Concorde landing in New York City to capture a once-a-year sunset against a runway at JFK Airport. The length of that shot? Ten seconds. Julie Salamon's 1991 book The Devil's Candy about the film's production dedicates an entire chapter to the shot and Schwab won a bet that the shot ended up in the final film at all. The film's opening title sequence was almost as expensive, to say nothing of the amount of money and effect spent on the nearly five-minute-long tracking shot that opens the film.
- Most of the reason the 2020 adaptation of The Call of the Wild had a budget north of $125 million was that all of the film’s animals were created using CG. This is especially the case with Buck, who was primarily created with a mocap actor.
- A large portion of A Christmas Story's $3.3 million budget was spent on an ultimately Deleted Scene. The scene features Ralphie having an Imagine Spot taking place in the Flash Gordon universe where he uses the Red Ryder BB gun to save Gordon from Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo. Despite the resources used to create the scene, including the large soundstage and set for the planet, the scene was forced to be cut by the studio to keep the runtime close to 90 minutes.
- Cleopatra infamously went over budget and fell behind schedule to become one of the biggest box office disasters in history. The catalyst? Elizabeth Taylor sarcastically saying she'd take the title role for $1 million. She was granted this, becoming the first actor to ever be paid that amount for a film. She fell ill with pneumonia while shooting in England, and the expenses included in her fee led to her being paid over $2 million before any usable footage had been shot.
- Cutthroat Island: Director Renny Harlin and lead actress Geena Davis (married to each other at the time) would have cases and cases of V8 Juice shipped out to the Malta sets for them to drink. As filming was wrapping up, there ended up being an entire room of V8 that everyone had to drink to finish it off.
- Elizabethtown is an otherwise modest drama for which a $45 million budget seems excessive. But with Cameron Crowe's penchant for using well known songs in his films, the licensing for the soundtrack jacked up costs considerably.
- The unproduced Muppet movie script, The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made provides an in-universe example. In the film, Gonzo is trying to make a film based on a nonsensical script that he wrote. It's supposed to be a globetrotting mystery. Unfortunately, he blows half the budget on the opening credits forcing him to cut more and more corners until eventually a single street corner is standing in for every location. Ironically, the film was never made because of how expensive the cost of making the film was estimated to be.
- The General (1926): The film's total budget was $750,000 (in 1926), of which approximately $42,000 was spent on a fifteen-second-long shot of a train crashing from a burning bridge into a river. It was the single most expensive shot in silent movie history. This was because it was a genuine train being crashed into the river and had six cameras filming at once to ensure they caught it because they could only do the stunt once (the wreckage remained submerged until it was salvaged for scrap in World War II).
- Heaven's Gate ended up costing approximately $44 million (in 1970s money) to make. Amongst the many things that Michael Cimino did that ramped up the budget:
- Based the production office in Kalispell, Montana, but chose a shooting location (Glacier National Park) that was a further two-and-half hour drive away, meaning that the entire crew earned five hours pay just driving to and from the set, essentially going into overtime pay every single day
- Forced the studio to buy acres of Montana land months in advance so that he could plant grass in the early spring because he had a vision of shooting the climactic final sequences in a field of autumn grass
- Demanded that the buildings on both sides of a western town set be torn down and rebuilt a few feet wider apart, at a cost of $1.2 million, all the while overruling the crew's objections that it would be much cheaper and easier to tear down only one side and move it the full distance away.
- Demanded that a period-appropriate steam train be transported to the shoot location even though its obsolete gauge meant that it would require a detour through five different states, increasing the amount spent on it from $15k to $150k.
- The Huntsman: Winter's War was an infamous bomb in 2016, with a well publicised dispute over the salaries of its stars contributing to the increased production costs - the Sony email hacks revealed that Chris Hemsworth was being paid $10 million to reprise his role as Eric, but Charlize Theron was only being offered $1 million.note As she was riding high from the success of Mad Max: Fury Road, she refused to reprise her role as Ravenna unless she was paid the same amount, resulting in $20 million being spent simply on two actors' salaries.
- I Am Legend spent about $5 million alone on the bridge collapse scene, due to a combination of expensive CGI and the extensive costs and bureaucracy of shooting a destructive action scene on-location in New York City.
- Imitation of Life (1959) was a modestly budgeted melodrama, where $1 million reportedly went to Lana Turner's wardrobe, because they intended to use the Costume Porn to draw in a large female audience, making it the most expensive wardrobe in cinema at the time.
- Justice League (2017) had a fairly straightforward principle photography, but in post-production Zack Snyder left and Joss Whedon was brought in to completely revamp the film. It's estimated about 48 percent of the film was remade in reshoots in a studio, much of which was close-ups of the actors with green screen backgrounds to try and match what they did when filming on location. All the actors also needed to be brought back, which was difficult as half were busy with other projects. The most famous was Henry Cavill grew a mustache for filming Mission: Impossible – Fallout and was not allowed to shave it for Justice League reshoots, requiring immense work to remove the mustache with CGI recreations of his face.
- King Kong (1976): Nearly $2 million of the film's $24 million budget (ballooned from an initial $16 million) was spent on a full-body, forty-foot-tall King Kong animatronic. It was intended to be used for the majority of the movie, but it proved inoperable (even breaking down once during filming) and looked unconvincing, so it only appears for about ten seconds total in the final film, while most of the rest was Rick Baker in an ape suit.
- King Richard had an overall budget of about fifty million USD. Forty million was used just to get Will Smith on to play the main character (the film ended up making slightly less than forty million at the box office, despite excellent reviews, in part due to releasing simultaneously on streaming).
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Casting Sean Connery as Allan Quartermain ate up nearly a quarter of the film's entire budget, $17 million of $73 million USD. The huge payout for Connery cut back on the budget for talent in other roles, which wound up contributing to the film's overwhelmingly negative reception.
- Little Shop of Horrors: It is estimated that approximately one-fifth of the film's $25 million budget was spent on the originally filmed Downer Ending where the Audrey II plants take over New York, a sequence that makes heavy use of elaborate puppetry and miniature effects. The scene was cut and replaced with a happier ending after negative test screenings.
- The Matrix Reloaded spent $2.5 million to construct and destroy a freeway set for a car chase scene.
- Mission: Impossible Film Series:
- Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: The reason for the film's gargantuan budget (around $300 million) was all the delays and safety measures the filming took during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: Like Dead Reckoning, the film had a gargantuan budget (anywhere between $300 million and $400). This time its inflation was due to the long production delays caused by the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail was made on a shoestring budget of just $400,000 — reportedly, a large chunk of that was spent just on the pyrotechnics for the Tim the Enchanter scene. Parodied during the film's opening credits, which are twice interrupted after going on bizarre tangents about moose, and are eventually finished "at the last minute and at great expense", implying that most of the film's budget went on the opening sequence.
- About a tenth of the multi-million-dollar budget for Spectre went to destroying luxury cars in action scenes, particularly several Aston Martin models specifically produced for the film. Also, Daniel Craig was paid around $27 million.
- $25 million of the $160 million budget for Speed 2: Cruise Control, almost as much as the entire budget for the first film, was spent on the climatic scene of the cruise ship crashing into Saint Martin, which included a large village set and a full-scale model of the ship’s bow.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture emerged from what was supposed to be a Sequel Series Star Trek: Phase II. While most of the sets built for the show were repurposed for the movie, production delays meant that the actors were getting paid every day regardless not filming anything because they were supposed to be filming the TV show, which pushed principle photography to start before they had a completed script so they could justify the cost.
- Street Fighter (1994) had a budget of $35 million, of which $8 million was spent — at Capcom's insistence — on hiring Jean-Claude Van Damme to play protagonist Guile. To balance out the books, a number of roles had to be filled by unknown actors, and some of the special effects ended up being quite shoddy because there wasn't enough money left for anything better. Worse still, the casting of the conspicuously Belgian Van Damme as the canonically all-American Guile ended up being a notorious case of Questionable Casting.
- Superman (1978):
- The movie famously had Marlon Brando earn $3.7 million for two weeks of work and roughly 20 minutes of screentime (including back-end deals he made another $17 million), while being billed above Superman himself Christopher Reeve.
- The opening credits themselves were technically very advanced and cost about $1 million, more than a lot of movies at the time.
- Superman Returns spent $10 million on Superman's return to Krypton due to the high cost of animation at the time. Unfortunately, this became a Deleted Scene due to clashing with the rest of the film's tone.
- Although it enjoyed a modest financial return, Simon Wells' The Time Machine used a significant portion of its budget on the props in Alexander's laboratory, namely the Time Machine itself and his collection of pocket watches.
- Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie: In-Universe. A big reason the Show Within a Show Bonjour, Diamond Jim cost a billion dollars to make was because Tim and Eric insisted on having the protagonist wear a suit covered in thousands of genuine diamonds. It ate up so much of the budget that they could only afford to shoot three minutes of footage, and they had to cast a Celebrity Impersonator as Diamond Jim instead of the real Johnny Depp.
- Tropic Thunder: In-universe, the titular Film Within a Film goes wildly over budget because they spent millions on the opening shot that didn't have anyone filming it. The fix involves making the film more grounded to cut overhead costs and to get the picture out on time. And then the director gets blown up by a landmine, the film’s subject turns out to be a fraud, and the crew ends up running afoul of a drug-smuggling ring that ends up driving one of the leads to the brink of insanity. Les Grossman even says that the death of one of the actors would be more profitable (on an insurance claim) than the film would ever make.
- Unbreakable filmed a Flashback scene of Elijah as a child in the 70's getting injured on a carnival ride but was left out of the movie. Because it required period-accurate clothing and equipment it was the most expensive sequence in the film, but removed for not flowing with the rest of the film. The sequel Glass adopts footage from the scene for its own story.
- Vanilla Sky spent $1 million of its $68 million budget renting out all of Times Square to film a short but symbolic scene where David dreams about the bustling city being completely empty.
Live-Action TV
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): A significant chunk of the Season 3 budget was used for "Exodus Part 1" and "Exodus Part 2" right at the start of the season. It meant that the rest of the season lacked action or major set pieces. As a result, the season ended up running on a much slower pace, and had a few meandering episodes that are considered the worst in the show.
- Boardwalk Empire's pilot had a total budget of $18 million, with $5 million alone being spent on the 300-foot-long (91 m) boardwalk set that would be used for the rest of the series.
- Charmed (1998):
- Holly Marie Combs later said that the infamously slashed Season 8 budget meant that Brian Krause had to be written out for ten episodes because of the celebrity guest stars the network was demanding. In the interview she specifically said Nick Lachey, but since he guest starred in Season 7, she may have been confusing him with Jason Lewis, who was the special guest star in Season 8.
- Phoebe gained the power to levitate in Season 3 and then lost that and her other active powers in Season 6 because the special effects were too costly. While it was considered well incorporated into the show, and did lead to a good arc of her earning back her premonitions, she didn't regain her levitation power until the follow-up comic books where this was no longer an issue.
- Community
- The first Paintball Episode was incredibly popular with fans and agreed to be the episode where the show grew its beard, but it was really expensive because the episode's very premise demanded they Trash the Set, so the show had to handle all future paintball episodes very carefully—from relegating it to the season finale where they could afford to go nuts to replacing it in the lower-budget seasons with pillow fights (and one snippet in a parodic Clip Show episode) and hot lava games to making the last one a pastiche of Spy Fiction about Frankie banning paintball on the Greendale campus.
- Because "Paradigms of Human Memory" spoofed the concept of a Clip Show by making all the things the study group flashes back to various Noodle Incidents instead of actual past episodes, it was actually the most expensive episode of Season 2 besides the aforementioned Paintball Episode, so the episode in between had to be a Bottle Episode.
- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: At the end of the song "Love Kernels", Rebecca breaks the fourth wall to say that the artsy music video, with its various scene changes and costumes to symbolize Rebecca's Love Martyr status, ate up the show's production budget, so they now have to recast Darryl with a broom. Word of God confirmed this song actually did use a good chunk of the production budget.
Rachel Bloom: But yes, that number was expensive — we went out to the desert for a day in pre-production to film those sweeping desert scenes, we built another set on stage with all that lavish, beautiful furniture. The costumes alone, I mean especially that cactus costume, it's expensive.
- Doctor Who: Showrunner Russell T Davies' inexperience with managing a sci-fi show resulted in most of the budget for series 1 being spent on the revival series' second episode, which featured heavy use of expensive CGI and elaborate practical alien effects and costumes. The reduced budget for the rest of the season is why many of the other episodes of series 1 have a contemporary UK setting.
- Game of Thrones: In the later seasons, Dany's dragons ended up eating a significant chunk of the CGI budget, which led to the Stark siblings' direwolves being written out of the series, as well as the Golden Company losing their war elephants in the final season.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) had two disproportionately big spends on relatively small elements.
- Firstly, the prosthetic second head for Zaphod Beeblebrox, which only intermittently worked, consumed more time and money than had been budgeted for.
- Secondly, the animation sequences representing The Guide itself. These were done with conventional cel animation, to represent CGI which would in 1980 have been way ahead of what computing could actually do. This also cost a bomb — but did work.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is an example that counts as a whole. The show is known to be the most costly show in the world in present, the price tag being nearly $500 million for the first season alone which is more than the cost of the entire film trilogy, and that's not including the $200 million that Amazon spent just to secure the rights to produce the show. A lot of those money went on the cinematography, where a whopping 9,500 visual effects shots were used, with a a total of 20 VFX studios and over 1,500 artists across all the studios only for the first season.
- Lost:
- In the episode, "Tricia Tanaka is Dead", a random meteorite destroys Mr Cluck's Chicken Shack, killing the Episode's title character and her cameraman. Despite the scene having not much importance to the episode or the series, it was alleged to be one of the most expensive shots in Lost, according to Visual Effects Supervisor Kevin Blank.
- During Season 4, Alan Dale was slated to appear in two separate episodes. However, Dale could not leave London, due to his stage commitments to the West End's production of Spamalot. Instead of writing him out, production decided to film Dale's scenes on location in London. This meant flying Michael Emerson, Kim Yunjin, and a crew out to London. In addition, Charles Widmore's apartment had to be built at Shepperton Studios, to be featured in "The Shape of Things to Come".
- Averted for "The End". The finale was intended to feature a volcanic eruption on the island, during the climatic fight between the Man in Black and Jack. Despite it being the Grand Finale, the network actually shot the idea down, due to the Final Season already being expensive. The writers would ultimately change the location of the fight to a stormy cliffside.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000: During the host segments of The Incredible Melting Man, Crow's screenplay for Earth vs. Soup is bought by the Mads and greenlit. They land a budget of $30 million, but between bonuses for Pearl and Clayton and several fees such as insurance and a completion bond, Crow is only given $800 to work with (which he spends most of on a scarf). And they expect him to get Kevin Bacon to star. This is meant as a Take That! to how the crew was treated when shooting The MST3K Movie.
- Only Murders in the Building features an in-universe example; one of the major expenses that caused Oliver's musical adaptation of Splash to go over budget was an elaborate set that was supposed to open onto an actual pool of water. Unfortunately for Oliver, the hydraulics failed during previews, and when the chorus boys all dove for the pool, they hit the stage instead, causing multiple injuries and a string of expensive insurance investigations.
- Power Rangers S.P.D. infamously blew so much of their budget on the final battle between the SPD SWAT Megazord and Grumm’s fortress that they didn’t have any money to have an actual actor for the Omega Ranger to have an actual identity outside the suit.
- Scrubs: The most expensive shot in the show was in the Milestone Celebration 100th episode, where JD was riding through puddles on his scooter only to disappear into a sudden sink hole and emerge from another puddle 50 feet away. Consider this was done in the standby Sacred Heart Hospital backlot, which required heavy digging equipment and water management for two deep holes, was done in one shot (and had to be done in one take), not to mention sacrificing a scooter, all for a single gag lasting ten seconds.
- Sense8 features a globe-spanning ensemble cast, with scenes set in San Francisco, Chicago, Mexico, Iceland, Germany, Kenya, India and South Korea. All shot on location, and with the effect of the telepathy being represented by characters appearing in the same space with each other, that meant filming with the full main cast at all locations. This lead to a reported budget of $9 million per episode.
- The Sopranos: In the episode "Proshai, Livushka", the producers had to deal with the fact Livia's actress died between Seasons 2 and 3, so they hastily made a brief last scene between her and Tony using a Digital Headswap which cost $250,000 for about 90 seconds of altered footage (although the production company behind the effect cut the bill in half in hopes of gaining publicity). Each episode cost about $2-6 million total to make (with the budget growing larger with each season).
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Late in the final season, the producers overspent on a CGI space battle sequence depicting the destruction of the USS Defiant, causing budget issues for the remainder of the run. This most visibly affected the episode "Extreme Measures", which had the trippy dream world described in the script abandoned in favor of simply reusing the series' regular space station and spaceship sets.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Next Phase'' was supposed to be a Bottle Episode using existing sets, but the intangibility effects proved way more costly than expected, resulting in the more expensive episode of the season.
- Conan O'Brien invoked this during his last weeks hosting The Tonight Show in an effort to spite NBC for their controversial treatment of his hosting era, making a point to introduce one-shot characters who weren't really that funny, but would cost NBC boatloads of money to put on the air. The biggest example was the "Bugatti Veyron Mouse," a very expensive car decorated like a mouse, accompanied by the original recording of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," which Conan claimed would cost NBC $1.5 million. That said, in the Grand Finale, after doing a "$65 million" bit where a Groundsloth fossil sprayed caviar over an original Pablo Picasso painting, he bluntly stated "It's not real!" in response to people complaining about the money not going to charity or something. (The Bugatti Veyron, incidentally, was loaned from a museum. They did still have to pay for the music rights, though.)
Music
- Fleetwood Mac ended up paying $1.4 million, the highest budget for an album at the time, for the recording of Tusk as they ended up building a new studio while also paying for studio rentals during the building process. This comes to almost $6 million dollars in 2024 dollars; as the album sold four million copies compared to 1977's Rumours (of which there were over ten million units sold), it was considered a commercial flop.
- Korn racked up a total bill of $4 million to produce the album Untouchables, largely from all the band members renting out separate mansions to live in during the recording process.
- Lady Gaga almost went bankrupt from the "Monster Ball" tour, which while selling out at every stop, featured a massive stage and large retinue of performers and at the lowest, Gaga was $3 million in debt.
- The first verse of One-Hit Wonder song "This Is Why I'm Hot" by MIMS features shout-outs to different regional hip hop scenes, paired with short samples from "Jesus Walks" by Kanye West, "Tell Me When To Go" by E-40, "Nuthin but a G Thang" by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and "Shook Ones pt II" by Mobb Deep, with the licencing on the samples eating a lion's share of the royalties.
- Frequent problem for Factory Records, as fictionalized in 24-Hour Party People (2002) (see Film section above)
- The sleeve for the 12" single for "Blue Monday" by New Order required a complicated process of pressing different size holes, making the original run of the single cost more to make than it sold for. As the single became a hit, later print runs were made with a more conventional sleeve, but the story of the original sleeve mutated into an Urban Legend that the single lost Factory Records money by becoming a hit. Label impresario Tony Wilson was more than happy to perpetuate the myth.
- The label's flagship nightclub, Hacienda, was a massive money sink, early on for not drawing in large crowds, and later when it did become a hotspot for the Acid house scene, the larger turnout didn't translate to drink sales, as people got their kicks from ecstasy.
- Happy Mondays pissed away a lot of the label's money in recording ...Yes Please! in Barbados, where the band switched their earlier heroin problem for a crack problem, and even stole and sold some studio equipment for drug money, although Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, whose studio they recorded at, say they only stole some deck furniture.
- In a less egregious incident before the Barbados debacle, New Order did also spend a lengthy and expensive stretch of time in Ibiza, recordingTechnique.
- Pink Floyd went in the red for the extremely elaborate stage tour of The Wall, with only keyboard player Rick Wright, who had been fired from the band proper, but hired as a performer for the tour, was the only one to make money, as he was paid a salary instead of a share from the profit. The nightly performance of the album necessitated the construction of a large wall across the whole stage and elaborate massive puppets based on the Gerald Scarfe animations in the movie.
- They Might Be Giants used a full two-thirds of the budget for Flood on just four songs (out of nineteen): Birdhouse In Your Soul, Your Racist Friend, We Want A Rock, and Istanbul (Not Constantinople). The tracks in question were produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, which presumably had something to do with the cost. Given that Birdhouse and Istanbul are two of their biggest hits, it was arguably an investment that paid off.
Music Videos
- The video for Custom's "Hey Mister," shot on No Budget with a handheld camera with the artist and his girlfriend going to the beach, was almost finished when the label gave the band more money. Most of the money was spent on a luxury car and a trip to Vegas, with the rest of the video still using that cheap handheld camera.
Theatre
- The budget for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was the highest for any Broadway production ever at $75 million, compared to $5-15 million for your average modern Broadway show. Most of that budget came from having to renovate the Foxwoods Theatre* to accommodate the massive amount of wire work and rigging in the production, meaning the production had to rent the venue for almost two years before any performances could happen. These renovations were halted at least once because the original, slightly lower budget couldn't support the costs and work had to be paused until they could pump more money into it.
Video Games
- Parodied to Hell and back in the Deadpool game by High Moon Studios with the Running Gag of Deadpool doing something insane, getting a call from High Moon Studios informing him that he broke the budget, and then getting a brief Genre Shift into some retraux level. During the end credits, he gets a call from High Moon Studios again telling him he never really broke the budget, which prompts him to set off a large amount of explosives that break the budget for real.
- The need to keep up to date with the latest engine and fanciest graphics doomed Duke Nukem Forever and took down George Broussard's career with him (3D Realms barely survived this one). Forever began to be developed in id Software's Id Tech 2 engine (the same one that powered Quake II and SiN). Before development started on the game, it was decided that Epic Games's Unreal Engine 1 (Unreal I and Unreal Tournament) was the engine of choice; the 2001 leaked version was even running under this engine. By the time they switched to Valve Software's Source engine, they had more or less a working game and were putting the final touches. Then they switched to Unreal Engine 2, but by then the game just went overbudget and the morale of the team was quite low; 5 years later the game was cancelled, and Gearbox Software (already having established a name by themselves thanks to the Sleeper Hit Borderlands 1) bought the franchise and resumed development in the game, finally managing to finish and release the game.
- In 1993, arcade game developer Toaplan released a quiz / lie detector game titled Enma Daiō, which attempted to stand out in a saturated market by putting forward a ridiculously huge (140 kg!) and gaudy Deluxe cabinet◊, which came with a custom biosensor and card dispensor. The game was both Toaplan's most expensive project due to the unique cabinet and a commercial failure, being a leading factor in the the company filling for bankruptcy a year later.
- The infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game cost at least $20 million to obtain the license to E.T. alone. It was developed in less than five weeks to be available for the Christmas season, sold fewer than three million copies overall, and unsold copies of it and other pieces of Atari hardware and software were buried in a landfill in the middle of New Mexico. E.T. is widely blamed for the The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, but it was just the straw that broke the shovelware-laden camel's back.
- In a post-mortem for Future Cop: L.A.P.D., one of the developers mentioned that the game had little traditional advertising because most of the assigned marketing budget was wasted on making a life-sized replica of the game's Humongous Mecha protagonist for Comic Con.
- Homefront cost $35-50 million just to develop and an additional tens of millions for marketing, making it THQ's most expensive game ever made (and also one of the most expensive games developed at the time). It was developed in barely two years and undershot both THQ's and Kaos Studios's expectations. Its commercial underperformance, combined with the expenses of operating a video game studio in an expensive place like Manhattan, led to THQ shutting down Kaos Studios a few month after its release.
- In an Iwata Asks interview (link), the developers of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword confirmed that the MotionPlus-enhanced gyro controls ate up a significant amount of time, with the mood getting "very nasty" for some time. Eiji Aonuma at one point decided to discard the MotionPlus, but other producers in Nintendo pressured him to return to the original idea. It didn't help that the controls required much more detailed animation work for Link, as they had to account for many different poses depending on how the sword was held and swung. This likely played a role in its very small surface world and barren sky overworld, the former of which would need to resort to Backtracking to lengthen the game further.
- Quo Vadis 2 is a strategy RPG for the Sega Saturn that caused the closure of its developer despite such games being traditionally cheap to develop. This is because the game features around 26 minutes of lavish 2D animated cutscenes, which cost an eye-watering 1-million yen per second to produce.
- As shared by various Ritual Entertainment employees (among them former Ritual QA Manager Michael Russell), the SiN franchise and the company itself weren't sunk by the lack of success of SiN Episodes: Emergence; the game actually did well enough to fund most of the planned 9 episodes. It was instead all the resources spent on a failed Quake IV expansion pack called Quake IV: Awakening, whose development was dropped after the main game didn't perform as expected. This led to Emergence having a very short budget (and the reuse of Half-Life 2 assets due to the game using the Source game engine) and later Ritual being sold to MumboJumbo and dissolved.
- Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri was already a minor Troubled Production when Looking Glass Studios's management got spooked by the attention Wing Commander III received for its Live-Action Cutscene and pressured the developers of Terra Nova to add its own live-action cutscenes. The move ballooned the budget of a game that was already over-deadlines, and scrapped plans for an online multiplayer mode.
- Too Human was, at the time of its release, estimated to have a budget of between $60-$100 million USD, due to the fact that development moved from the PlayStation to the Nintendo GameCube before ending up on the Xbox 360, and the shift in SKUs required development to restart from scratch. Developer Silicon Knights ended up trying to save money by not paying Epic Games's licensing fee for its Unreal Engine, a move which resulted in a legal battle that eventually led to the destruction of all unsold physical copies of the game and the shuttering of Silicon Knights.
- Vexx: Due to a mistake while writing the contracts, what was supposed to be the game's entire voice acting budget was granted to a single actor (Brian Cox, who voiced the game's antagonist Dark Yabu). This forced most of the cutscenes to be scrapped.
- According to former Legend Entertainment mapper Matthias Worch, the dip in quality of Unreal II: The Awakening had to do with the team trying to cram as many things as possible into the TCA Atlantis intermission sequences. They ended up diverting resources into those sections that didn't feature shooting in a game that's basically a First-Person Shooter.
Matthias Worch: If you ask yourself "What is the game about?" and break down a game by its core gameplay mechanics, the main component of the game, the shooting, had better be present in all major parts of the game. Unreal 2 is a First-Person Shooter. And you don't shoot on Atlantis. Instead, you do all the things that slow down the shooting action during an actual mission: exploration and talking. (...) I love the ambition and effort that we put into the level. It works. But all that effort also distracted and took resources from the other areas of the game that could have used extra help. Putting more focus on the Kai (our version of the Nali) for example. Or finishing the SP missions I had to abandon during development.
Web Videos
- Parodied by Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition. In a bonus video about the making of the game, an anonymous member of Sonic Team admits that they had a lot of money left over and decided to splurge on a bunch of computer-animated 3D segments that served no purpose beyond looking cool. Then those 3D segments ended up running significantly over budget—and now Sonic Team will be in deep financial trouble if the game doesn't sell.
- Happens In-Universe in the DEATH BATTLE! episode pitting Deadpool against the Mask when Deadpool takes out a seventh Infinity Gem he calls the "Continuity Gem". Attempting to use it to make Ipkiss take off the mask results in him blowing the budget and sending both combatants back to the storyboard. The Mask decides the best way to fix this is for him and Deadpool to raise money in the real world (depicted by a live-action segment) to finish the episode.
- Sarah Z once ranted about how her high school production of Legally Blonde blew most of its budget on renting a golf cart that would be on stage for thirty seconds, and as a result their next year's production of Into the Woods had to use minimalistic sets.
- Achievement Hunter: The exact price for licencing whole movies for Theater Mode was never openly stated, but Geoff Ramsey has inferred that it was the most expensive show the group ever made.
Western Animation
- In the American Dad! episode "Top of the Steve", Steve and Roger try to stop the spinoff from working, only to be repeatedly railroaded. They eventually realize the spinoff is a Vancouver production, meaning it's on a cheap budget. Roger suggests they get the spinoff to go over budget by singing The Beatles, since just two notes of a song of theirs cost as much as $5 million. They decide to sing "Hey Jude", but they get as far as "Hey..." before the episode abruptly Smash Cuts to the Reset Button Ending.
- Chowder: During the episode "Shopping Spree", the main cast goes overboard spending money on luxury items when they were meant to just buy a replacement machine; they go completely broke, which results in the animation ceasing and the show temporarily switching to live-action as the voice actors organize a car wash to raise enough money to get back into animated form.
- Family Guy:
- In "You May Now Kiss the... Uh... Guy Who Receives", Quagmire randomly launches into the chorus of "Witch Doctor" when refusing to sign Brian's petition. On the commentary track, Seth MacFarlane called it "the $10,000 joke" because of how much they had to pay to use the song.
- In "Road to the Multiverse", the show receives an Animation Bump due to Brian and Stewie ending up in a Disney-style universe. Word of God states that the season's entire budget went towards animating that three-minute segment.
- Family Guy Presents: Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The opening crawl in "Something Something Something Dark Side" is full of Biting-the-Hand Humor at Fox for their lack of faith in the Star Wars franchise, boasting that if Fox can be foolish with their money, so can Family Guy. They then throw a random CG-animated elephant onscreen and point out that it wasted $58,000.
- Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In-Universe. In "One False Movie", Mac is tasked with creating a movie to be shown at a film festival, with Bloo directing. Bloo immediately blows their budget for a megaphone (said to have once belonged to Cecil B. DeMille) to boss everyone around with, leaving Mac to sell some of his stuff online to scrounge up more money.
- Futurama: In-Universe. In "That's Lobstertainment!", post-production on Harold Zoid's movie is reduced to less than a week because they blew the budget on pies for a background pie fight.
- Invader Zim: "A Room with a Moose" has a scene with some computer-generated walnuts. On the episode commentary, Jhonen Vasquez jokes that they weren't meant to be CGI and it blew the entire animation budget for the season.
Melissa Fahn: Is that right? Was it really expensive?
Vasquez: Well, we were gonna have the season end with a giant space battle, but they had blown the budget on the walnuts, so... it was upsetting. - This was the main reason why The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Deja View" was scrapped and repurposed for the DC Comics series, since the visual effects costs for when the titular girls jumped to the Bizarro Universe went way over budget.
- Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa: This Christmas Special features a massive All-Star Cast, which includes Walter Emanuel Jones, Mark Hamill, Jodi Benson, Paige O'Hara, Grey DeLisle, and Nancy Cartwright. The voice cast is of highly talented virtue, but the animation and writing? Not so much. In fact, due to the animators and writers having very little money to work with after it was blown on the voice cast (most notably the CGI looking so ugly that it looks worse than a PlayStation 1 game), the special only aired on TV once and never aired again.
- The Simpsons: Parodied in "The Fight Before Christmas," where the final scene is done in puppetry and features Katy Perry as a Special Guest. Mr. Burns is only able to release one of his trademark hounds, which is just a cheap sock puppet because they blew the budget on Perry.
- Space Ghost Coast to Coast: Joked about (among many other things) in the low-budget show. According to Zorak, "every time I move my arm, it costs the Cartoon Network 42 bucks," and he then proceeds to demonstrate by barely shifting his arm and counting how much money even small movements cost and seeing how much money he can run up.
- Star Wars Rebels: Darth Vader was one, thanks to the cost of his cape's cloth simulation. Any episode that he appeared in would either have to have a higher budget than normal or concessions to keep costs under control.
- Mentioned In-Universe in Star Warp'd, when Captain Kwirk asks where the crew is after they emerge from a time warp over modern-day Earth. Mr. Spuck replies "Not in the budget, Captain". Later lampshaded when they need an engineering miracle and Captain Kwirk says that he hopes Mr. Squat was spared by the budget cuts.
- The Venture Bros.: The season two premiere "Powerless in the Face of Death" uses the licensed song "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)" by Rozalla in its opening montage. The creators had to fight tooth and nail with Cartoon Network as, according to creator Doc Hammer, the licensing cost 1/8 of the season's entire budget. They included some Biting-the-Hand Humor in both a later episode and the DVD Commentary (which includes a voicemail from a network exec initially denying them the money) poking fun at the situation. It was only after Hammer played them the scene cut to some (intentionally) awful music he had written that they agreed to pay for the rights.
- Wander Over Yonder: In-Universe. In "The Cartoon" in Hater's cartoon, when it finally becomes time for The battle between Cartoon Hater and Cartoon Awesome, the camera just cuts to two Watchdogs watching the fight. When the real Hater complains about this, the Watchdogs reveal they blew all the animation budget on the Watchdogs fight, claiming they felt it was "more important to the narrative."
