Movie Budgets

[TriedandTested]

I was having a browse on IMDB (like you do) and noticed this:

Inception. Estimated budget: £160,000,000
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/business

How to Train Your Dragon. Estimated budget: £165,000,000
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892769/business

Now, is this a mistake/bad estimate, or does a fully CGI film cost more to make than one that is part CGI, part live action?

Considering the salaries of the actors in Inception, vs those used in 'Dragon...I'm not sure how it all adds up.

The CGI in both films are exceptional ('Dragon, for a animated cartoon, is especially good).

 

[logix42p]

how to train your dragon grossed nearly $500 million dollars worldwide (thanks google) so not a bad return on the money. I guess CGI movies could be pretty labour intensive and takes a long time to make

 

[Grandmaster Fap!]

Are these budgets something to do with the 3D technology? It might explain why Toy Story 3 is so close to Inception and not closer to TS 1/2 which to be fair dont look much worse than 3 and have much lower budgets.

 

[lsg1r]

It's purely down to cgi costing more to produce.

A simple way of looking at it is this, a 10 minute part played by an actor can take 10 minutes to do (assuming 1 take), 10 minutes of cg could take several days to complete depending on how complex the scene is and that's ignoring render time which again can take days.

You've also got major actor/actress fees that can soon add even as just voices.

 

[Vonhelmet]

It's purely down to cgi costing more to produce.

A simple way of looking at it is this, a 10 minute part played by an actor can take 10 minutes to do (assuming 1 take), 10 minutes of cg could take several days to complete depending on how complex the scene is and that's ignoring render time which again can take days.

You've also got major actor/actress fees that can soon add even as just voices.

10 minutes of CGI will take a lot longer than "several days".

 

[lsg1r]

Several days can mean anything from 3 days+, it's a loose term. I also never said that they'd be doing the cg model's in this time frame, having pre-rigged characters will speed up the day to day work considerably.

You will also find that usually there would be a group of people working on a scene and major studios will also have specialised software/scripts to speed up certain processes/tasks.

Rendering will be done on a render farm and with the amount of variables in that I couldn't give an accurate time frame for the rendering.

I do 3d work (albeit a different area to films) for a living so I know exactly the type of work which is required and the sort of time involved, it's not a quick job, but with the right tools/software, things that took weeks a few years back will now take a lot less time.