OPINION:
Studios underreport their films' budgets all the time: it's an easy way to make their box office returns look more impressive. But could it ever be in anyone's interests to claim a profitable film cost more to make than it actually did? Rumours are circulating that the year's biggest surprise hits to date might be just such an unusual case.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, the sci-fi multiverse comedy from the directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, has been one of the biggest success stories of the 2022 back-to-cinemas push. This entirely original – and courageously mad – independent production has taken almost US$95 million (NZ$154m) worldwide to date, and is still playing in UK cinemas 10 weeks on from its release.
When Everything Everywhere was first shopped around to international buyers by distributors A24 last year, it was widely reported to have cost $25 million ($40m): not quite a blockbuster sum, but a sizeable step up from the $10 million ($16.2m) price tags of Hereditary, Midsommar and The Lighthouse, let alone the $1-2 million ($1.6 - $3.2m) of little-indies-that-could like Minari and Moonlight.
But on a recent episode of his superb podcast The Town, journalist Matthew Belloni relayed industry whispers that Everything Everywhere's true budget was in fact lower: the larger figure had been allowed to circulate unchecked, he explained, because it was in everyone's interests for the film to be seen as an ambitious, extravagant production rather than a whimsical pet project. And watching it, you'd never guess otherwise: in fact, if I'd been told $50 million ($81.3m), I'd have probably believed it.
How is it possible that a sub-$25 million ($40.6m) film can be so dazzling when those that cost up to 10 times as much regularly look so cheap? The Gray Man, Netflix's new Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans-led Mission: Impossible-alike, is a perfect example. At $200 million ($325m), it's the most expensive film the streaming company has yet produced, but despite its handsome stars and glamorous locations, the entire enterprise somehow radiates slapdash ugliness.
One particular sequence – a brawl on board a rapidly disintegrating cargo plane – is about as bad as these things get; a blurry spew of grey digi-chowder which doesn't convince you for a second that Gosling's character is actually in mortal jeopardy.
There's been much online grumbling, too, about the quality of the visual effects in Thor: Love and Thunder - budget: $250 million ($406m), especially a scene involving a psychic projection of a disembodied head, which wouldn't have looked out of place in a late classic-era episode of Doctor Who. Considering Thor draws so much inspiration from 1980s kid culture – action figures, Saturday morning cartoons, and so on – I'm certain the datedness and corniness of that specific effect is wholly intentional.
But the bitterness of the backlash speaks to a growing dissatisfaction with the drabness and messiness of the modern blockbuster look. Why do these films numb and flummox us when those made decades ago still easily amaze, as well as those made today with far more meagre resources? The Green Knight and Ex Machina each cost $15 million ($24.3m): the latter won an Oscar for its visual effects. On those bigger productions, if we can't see the money on screen any more, where on earth has it gone?
There are two broad problems here, the first of which was foretold by Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond more than 70 years ago: the pictures really have got small. Not the cinema screens themselves, but the images on them, which are increasingly shot and edited with television viewing in mind. That means certain compositions are out: during conversations, for example, the camera rarely retreats beyond a medium close-up, since further away, facial expressions become too fiddly to read on small screens, even on the sharpest, shiniest OLED.
That's partly why The Gray Man is so boring to look at: its cast are framed the same way whenever we see them. Compare that to Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, which keeps finding new ways to look at Austin Butler for the sheer visual bliss of it, and it's clear why only one looks cinematic.
The second problem is what's happening to those small-in-spirit pictures once they've been captured: in short, far too much. Elaborate visual effects were what made the franchise era possible, but when virtually every shot of a two-hour film requires some digital tinkering, chances are one or two won't come out quite right.
Factor in last-minute reshoots and immovable release dates, and things get exponentially worse as VFX artists race to meet deadlines without fully understanding how the scene they're working on is meant to look. In a recent discussion thread on Reddit, some in the industry despairingly described the culture of last-minute scheduling crunches at Marvel, in which key decisions weren't made until the last possible moment, and round-the-clock work was required to get the results to a releasable standard.
This fix-it-later mindset has only become further entrenched during the pandemic. Why bother with an exorbitantly Covid-proofed location shoot when you can plonk your actors in front of a green screen and reassure them the atmosphere – and sometimes even their scene partners – will be added in later, from a virus-free computer suite?
Well, filmmakers bother because however powerful the technology might currently be, the flat, fluorescent-tube-buzzing atmosphere of the computer suite always prevails. What would you rather have to show for $200 million ($325m)? The Gray Man's draining TV/CG non-aesthetic, or Top Gun: Maverick, and $30 million ($48.7m) in change?
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