Digital doppelgangers, photogrammetry, real-time rendering using game engines – it seems like just an incomprehensible set of words from the IT-sphere. In fact, these terms are the latest technologies that the film industry is trying to implement or is already actively using. With the advent of computer graphics, the scale and showiness of a scene in a movie, and with it its price is determined only by the imagination of the director. For what episodes of world cinema creators had to pay a lot of money – we tell in this article.
The most expensive
For more than 20 years, the seventeen-minute fight scene of the main character in the movie “The Matrix: Reloaded” has held the title of the most expensive episode in cinema. All the heroes were dressed in special costumes created just for this scene. Drones and video cameras were used to shoot, and many different visual effects were added in post-production, which made the battle where Neo stops the bullets really incredible. For example, the rotation of the camera around the stairs while the characters are in the antigravity environment makes it feel like they’re flying. It’s worth noting that a three-lane, three-mile-long highway was built for the chase scene. The seventeen minutes of film cost 40 million dollars and took 27 days to film. The main share of the check was the special effects. Producers doubted that such an investment would pay off and Keanu Reeves even turned down $38 million from ticket sales. Fears, however, were not borne out: on a budget of $ 150 million box office receipts the film was more than $ 742 million.
How much does it cost to blow something up?
Sometimes directors don’t want to use computer graphics for one reason or another. For example, in the film by Christopher Nolan «Tenet», it would be more expensive to use special effects than to blow up a real plane:
I planned to do it using miniatures and set-piece builds and a combination of visual effects and all the rest. We started to run the numbers… It became apparent that it would actually be more efficient to buy a real plane of the real size, and perform this sequence for real in camera, rather than build miniatures or go the CG route. It’s a strange thing to talk about – a kind of impulse buying, I suppose.
Of course, you can’t blow up a plane twice. The episode was shot in one take. The crew was cheering and shouting “Hooray!” when the director said: «Stop, shot». The cost of a Boeing 747 (that’s what blew up in the movie) is about $ 385 million, which does not fit into the budget picture – $250 million. Director himself does not specify a purchase price, saying only that it was «impulsive».
Before the movie «Tenet» Nolan also set off explosions. His pyrotechnic debut can be considered a scene in «The Dark Knight», when the Joker leaves the hospital and blows it up. For the shooting of this episode producers specially purchased the building of the old candy factory and converted it into a hospital, where the huge explosion was made. It cost $700 thousand, but during the shooting of the scene there was a problem with the pyrotechnic charges and the chain reaction of the explosion stopped. Then the scene was saved by improvisation by Heath Ledger, who adjusted to the situation without stepping out of character. In this case, computer graphics would be a safer investment, but it was probably because of the episode from The Dark Knight that we saw the larger experiment in Tenet.
The bombing scene of the central span of the Brooklyn Bridge in the movie «I am Legend» cost $5 million. There, on the contrary, was no computer graphics. The episode is based on the evacuating the main character’s family from the contaminated zone. To do this, it was necessary to attract real military equipment: the Ministry of Defense and soldiers of the National Guard helped the filming. About a thousand extras and about 250 crew members took part in the scene.
Thousands of dollars for every word
However, the cost of a stage is not always determined by the number of special effects or the use of special techniques. Sometimes the main cost of the episode is the participation of a famous actor in the frame. For 15 minutes in the blockbuster «Spider-Man: Homecoming» Robert Downey Junior was paid $10 million. Of course, the actors received larger sums for filming, but they received such money not by the contract, but by the percentage of box office fees. For example, in the film «Mission: Impossible 2» Tom Cruise had no fixed salary at all. The picture brought him $147 million.
The shortest and at the same time the most expensive scene is attributed to Julia Roberts in the film «Valentine’s Day». For six minutes on the screen she earned $3 million. Her fans counted: during this time the actress said 251 words. If you divide them by the amount earned, it turns out that for each word the actress earned almost $12,000.
