People.com reports that the cost of the Hobbit movie may be . . . half a billion dollars.
Holy Crow. So they're using expensive gene-splicing to create a race of Hobbits this time, and the actors won't submit to the technique until they perfect the reversing process? Or problems with the unions in New Zealand mean the director will have to build a replica of New Zealand a few miles away?
One. Hundred. Million. In legal fees. Don't recall any subplot that had Bilbo followed around by a process server. Considering how much CGI will go into this movie, it's astonishing that it would cost $400 million. The drama and problems surrounding this movie have been legendary, and it's shaping up as a spectacular disaster along the lines of Heaven's Gate and Waterworld - but given Peter Jackson's skill with the LotR trilogy, it'll probably be good. It will just feel odd to look at your ticket and realize that 20% of the price went to lawyers.
Who cares? you say. It'll be a great movie. But the more it costs, the more it might not be made. If you're familiar with Hollywood accounting, you know that movies never make money, because if they admit it's profitable then they have to pay some people down the chain. So somehow they're always in the red. By the magic standards of Hollywood, the Star Wars series probably bankrupted everyone who ever said the word "Luke," and "Avatar" ran a deficit that made the Zimbabwe budget look like a masterpiece of Swiss precision.
