‘Avatar’ Budget Close To $500 Million – One Of The Most Expensive Films
A NYT report about the financial realities that lie ahead for James Cameron’s Avatar and 20th Century Fox, posted an estimation of the film’s costs of $500 Million Dollars. While we will never know the real figure, the approximations should be close enough to the actual costs and if it’s right, Avatar is now one of the most expensive movies of all time. Now the question is – how big should the sales be to make a profit on such a huge budget?
The report says that the movie carries “little financial risk for Fox’s parent company, the News Corporation, even if it disappoints.” The lack of risk is apparently due to the reliance on outside investors and help from a network of allied companies and in-house business units.
Michael Cieply, author of this NYT article, says at what point the various partners in Avatar would see profit from the film depends on what share of revenue each receives as the movie reaches theaters, then home video and other media around the world. He seems to believe that should the film hit $250 million “Fox and its allies would appear to be headed into the black.”
Moving beyond such matters, it is interesting to learn Dune Entertainment and Ingenious Media picked up 60-percent of the budget for Avatar according to anonymous sources. And even more interesting is the report that if final production costs exceeded $300 million Cameron would effectively defer much of his payout until the studio and others were compensated, despite upwards of 15 years of his labor on the movie.
Fox’s biggest investment is said to be in an estimated $150 million worldwide marketing plan. Many may have recently seen the preview of the Avatar trailer, that was paid for by Fox, but apparently partners are stepping in elsewhere such as the highly touted “Avatar Day” this past summer where IMAX stepped in and supported the screenings of 15-minutes of footage from the film without significant cost to the studio.
Source: RopeOfSilicon
November 9th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
No way this can go bad. I’m sure everyone wants to see the Europeans take down that Indians again.
November 9th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Holy cow. He’s got to be under a lot of pressure since Avatar doesn’t have mass appeal (IMO). This ain’t no Titanic. Doesn’t appeal to small kids, doesn’t appeal to mom and pop movie goers, has a ton of “non cutesy” CGI. This movie will only appeal to Cameron fanboys and science fiction fans. To top it off the movie’s real appeal is to be seen in IMAX digital 3D. There aren’t that many of those around.
November 11th, 2009 at 1:20 am
Altough I know of the existence the film, only a few here in my town here in the Netherlands know it is comming.
If they want this film to be an block buster, they realy need to do something about the promotion of the film.
the only thing i have seen is the film poster, no trailer or promotion of any kind.
This film will flop like Dune(yes Dune did flop), if they go on like this, I realy don`t want that to happen.
I`m looking forward to see Avatar.
November 15th, 2009 at 2:16 am
Yup, it looks like it’s going just like watchmen, hopefully it does better..
December 11th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Avatar will exceed expectations. We just watched an episode of Bones last week for gods sake and the tv actors were portraying fans standing in line to watch it. Advertising for this film is unbelievable but despite that, it’s going to be a great movie.
Dune is still one of my favorite movies to this day. Too many people were expecting ‘Star Wars’ and this movie actually required a true SCI-FI fan to appreciate.
Watchmen can’t be put in the same category as this movie. Avatar does have mass appeal. Watchmen was a cult classic which typically doesn’t have mass appeal so people who watched it at the movies and had never seen or heard of it prior had no idea what they were in store for and absolutely hated it. There is no doubt what you are going to watch when you go see Avatar. We will all know next week.
I’d bet the farm on this one.