Film budgets are a big topic of discussion of late. Around or near $300 million was spent on the most recent “Indiana Jones” and “Mission: Impossible” films, both of which underwhelmed at the box-office compared to past entries.
Meanwhile, many of the biggest hits of the year have all been relatively frugal and have reaped the profitability that comes with it, such as “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Oppenheimer” which cost $100 million each.
Same with “Barbie” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse” which, despite escalating costs during production, still came in at around $140 million each. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” is drawing rave reviews and was a downright steal at just $70 million.
One film that’s found itself at the center of this talk is Pixar’s “Elemental”. Coming in at $200 million, their films cost considerably more than their competitors. After a soft opening saw it dismissed as a bomb, the movie hung in there and has managed a worldwide gross of over $400 million. Whilst it may hit profit, its margin would be far bigger if it were cheaper.
Speaking with Variety, Pixar president Jim Morris was asked why their films cost more than others, and he explains it comes down to several factors. One is outsourcing, which Pixar doesn’t do:
“One of the ways you make these films for less money, and almost all of our competitors do this, is to do work offshore. It’s only us and Disney Animation that makes animation films in the U.S. anymore, with all of the artists under one roof. We feel like having a colony of artists approach has differentiated our films.”
Cartoon Brew points out that while both ‘Turtles’ and ‘Spider-Verse’ were done in Canada and ‘Mario’ was done in France, “Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken” from Dreamworks was a fully unionised U.S. production and still came in at $70 million compared to the $200 million for non-unionized Pixar titles like “Elemental” and “Lightyear”.
Another reason, according to Morris, is that Pixar’s accounting includes certain items other studios don’t include, such as executive salaries:
“The other thing I’ll say about our film budgets is that our whole company exists only to make these films. So when we say a budget, that is everything it takes to run the whole company. Sometimes, the budgets [for other films] that get reported are physical production costs and don’t include the salaries of executives and things like that. Our budgets include all of that, so there’s some accounting context that gets lost. But that doesn’t mean they’re not expensive.”
Morris adds “Elemental” was particularly expensive because “all the characters have visual effects” such as volumetric simulations that required upgrading its supercomputer infrastructure.
The obvious question is, will Pixar films ever be able to be made cheaper to which he says “that’s a constant question” and added they had been getting the film costs down until “Elemental” with its technical complexity.
