'TRON' Price Tag Up to $300 Million?

We've been following the box office very closely this year because of how it's outpacing other sectors of the American economy. Whereas it's headline news in just about every other corner of life in this country, the movie business is doing well, almost surprisingly so. We wrote about the strength of last weekend's performance by Fast & Furious and some of the other movies in theaters, making it the top April weekend ever. The month appears headed that way, too. So is Hollywood looking past the national recession and only taking into account that over the past four months, business has been good? That might be part of the thinking for some of the major studios; James Cameron's Avatar was trumpeted by Time as shouldering a $300 million budget. That's not the actual number Paramount's playing with, though. The studio says it's over $200 million. Still, with marketing and all the rest, it's going to cost a third of a billion dollars. And now there's news from the Vancouver Sun that Disney is spending way too much money on TRON:

"Vancouver post-production units are salivating at the prospects presented by the Disney remake of TRON, which carries a whopping $300 million budget and opportunities aplenty for effects and digital polish. The 1982 version of the film starring Jeff Bridges blazed new trails in computer graphics and you can bet TRON 2.0 will push much further down the pixel path."

Can this movie make that kind of money back? Can it then go on to show a workable profit margin? And why in the hell would Disney, a company that Wall Street has zero confidence in at the moment, spend that frivolously? I want to see the new TRON and I want it to be successful. But I'll never be convinced that it should cost anywhere near as much as the first trip to the moon. And the trouble with this is, the studio chiefs will look at the razor-thin earnings this could make (because to truly be profitable it would have to earn at least $800 million worldwide) and think sci-fi is the problem. The problem is making a movie for twice as much as you need to.

Comments

[orinn]

How many movies even make 300mil no matter production cost. I know movies cost more but really anything over 100mil and your doing something wrong.