Absolutely amazing story at the LA Times analysing the budget of Sahara, one of the most costly flops in Hollywood history. Reasonable success at the box office has been swamped by production costs around the $160m mark.
The LA Times’ story is confusingly laid out, but there are some real eye-openers in there. Movies are big business, but some of this spend seems astonishing. And the culprit for the doubling of budgeted cost? Blamed on ‘failure to lock down a script,’ it seems. Ah, that old chestnut. It seems the entire industry is mired in the inability to actually make decisions.
And yes, I realise I wasn’t exactly a paragon of producorial decision-making. It’s simply impossible, even on a small production, to make every decision that someone believes is necessary — I sometimes think that the judgmental skill lies not in making correct decisions, but rather in choosing the right things on which to decide.
And hey, my productions came in on budget, so I wasn’t that bad.
