Coming towards the end of 2025, I was bombarded on all sides by advertising for “Avatar: Fire and Ash”. As a person who has only ever seen “Avatar” once, and who has almost entirely forgotten what the film was about, I had less interest in seeing the latest instalment in James Cameron’s cinematic juggernaut of a franchise, and rather more in seeing whether people are actually interested in these movies anymore.
In this state of curiosity, I perused some of the film’s numbers, and was not entirely surprised to learn that it has reportedly grossed over $930 million, and is expected to go well beyond the billion-dollar-mark, placing its box office takings at a value higher than the GDP of some small countries. This is, however, offset by a mind-blowing budget of $400 million. Many of the other high-earning films of the year, such as “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning”, “Superman”, and “F1”, are each estimated to have cost $200 million or more to make. Meanwhile, Marvel Studios, in what may be its last desperate attempt to reobtain some relevance, will likely spend somewhere over billion dollars on its upcoming movie projects, “Avengers: Doomsday”, and “Avengers: Secret Wars”, for which actor Robert Downey Jr. alone is reportedly being paid upwards of $100 million.
Anyone with a critical eye should quickly recognise that all the films mentioned above (with the notable exception of “F1”) were either sequels, franchise instalments, or reboots of previous films. A more comprehensive list of the highest grossing films of the year will reveal a similar trend, with a “Jurassic World” movie making the grade, and yet another Disney remake of an older animated film. Many people notice this, and complain that the biggest problem in modern filmmaking is intellectual property fatigue. While this is a problem (and one I have addressed before), it is not, I believe, the greatest problem. One of the most severe and most cancerous issues plaguing modern Hollywood is obscene over-budgeting.
The average person would probably find it incredible that anyone could spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a single film (let alone a single actor), yet studios seem to be doing it as if it has become a mere trifle. This kind of exorbitant spending on movies has only worsened over the past few years, and its negative effects have become more and more clear as time goes on.
First, there is the quite simple issue of distribution of funds. This problem is seen constantly in government, but is also seen – and arguably more clearly – in most companies, including movie studios. Put simply, a studio only has so much money to spend, and when more money is being spent on one project, less will be spent on others. If a project’s budget reaches the heights that some do today, it quite probably means the stifling of smaller films, sacrificed for the box office success of the hoped-for blockbuster. It is not difficult to imagine that, as a result of Disney’s spending on most of its Marvel and Star Wars projects alone, much more intelligent and mature (and cheaper) productions never saw the light of day.
Of course, this kind of budget prioritisation for large projects creates a paradox: the more money you spend on a project to make it succeed, the more it must succeed in order to turn a profit. While spending more may help a film’s success to a certain degree, there comes a point at which no more money spent on the project will make a real difference, and I venture a guess that many films today go well beyond this point.
Finally, there is the problem of expectations and norms. We have reached a point in our culture where any film coming from a major studio is almost expected to cost a hundred million dollars at least, and some major films (particularly those with a franchise name attached) are scoffed at if they fail to make a “mere” billion dollars at the box office. What we see is studios ballooning film budgets almost as if it were a competition, while actors reap some of the greatest benefits, receiving tens of millions each in some cases for an hour of screen time.
Some might object that I am no industry insider – how should I know the ins-and-outs of what a film should cost? It is true that I do not have any real expertise in this matter, but common sense is sometimes sufficient. While expertise may be able to explain away the “Avengers” budget, common sense will tell anyone that paying Robert Downey Jr. – talented though he is – over $100 million to play a Marvel supervillain for two movies is ludicrous.
Spending this kind of money on films is not normal, nor is it necessary. In 2023, Japanese studio Toho released “Godzilla Minus One” – a film with a budget reported to be $15 million or less – to critical and audience acclaim. While the Americans were making a movie in which Godzilla turns pink and King Kong gets a giant metal boxing glove to fight an ice dragon, Toho made a serious and mature movie about a kamikaze pilot who retreated from his duty, and his return to the devastation left behind by the nuclear bomb on Japan (of which the monster Godzilla is an embodiment). Moreover, and in spite of its minimalist budget, the film displayed some spectacular digital effects, and went on to win the “Academy Award for Best Visual Effects”. A better-known example is the 2014 Keanu Reeves film “John Wick”, which had an estimated budget of a mere $20 million, and yet has built itself into one of the most successful action franchises in film today.
Many people of a more conservative leaning tend to scoff at filmmaking as trivial and unimportant in “the real world”. However, I beg to differ. Filmmaking, like all the visual arts, plays a major role in shaping our culture and society, and it is therefore important to call attention to it if it is being perverted or grossly mismanaged. I don’t think expensive movies will end our civilisation, but they are perhaps a signal of a dying culture – a culture that has run out of ideas and it desperately trying to rehash old ones with flashy new effects. If a studio simply cut a few million dollars from each of its major productions, and gave these instead to an up-and-coming indie director, they would still get their blockbuster film with minimal effect on its success, and might also achieve a box office hit from their smaller project. And that would be good for everyone.
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Patrick Vincent writes from Dublin