The five most unnecessarily expensive movies ever made
Making movies is an expensive business, and with so much going into putting them together, it’s a miracle any of them make any money at all.
It’s all par for the course, where hundreds of wages have to be paid, equipment has to be rented, locations have to be booked and travelled to, cinema owners have to be bribed, and so much more in between, that none of this comes cheap.
Millions and millions of dollars might have been spent, but at least there’s something to show for it…well, most of the time. Sometimes, a film comes out that resembles a giant money black hole, absorbing everything in sight while giving nothing back.
These five financial farces all cost over $200million to make, and that’s just their nominal budgets, for when adjusted for inflation, those figures soar even higher, leaving them among some of the most expensive films ever made. With the nature of filmmaking being what it is, it’s impossible to know for sure exactly how much was spent on these films, except for the fact that when all was said and done, it totally wasn’t worth it.
Five films that were too expensive for nothing
‘Superman Returns’ (Bryan Singer, 2006)<br>
After Superman IV: The Quest for Peace killed any interest in the legendary DC hero on film, the ‘Man of Steel’ lay dormant for the better part of two decades until he roared back into life in the form of Superman Returns, which was bad and also really weird. Brandon Routh’s only big-screen outing as Metropolis’ protector, what should have been the rocket fuel that relaunched Supes into the 21st century, ended up careening directly into the Earth instead, and at the price of an actual rocket launch too.
Superman Returns cost an estimated $204million in 2006; for context, James Gunn’s 2025 version of Superman cost $225m, and considering how ludicrously expensive films have become over the past decade or so, a $21m increase over 19 years really isn’t that much. The action sequences and effects aren’t bad or anything, but when you look at that pricetag, it doesn’t seem worth it at all. The budget was so impossibly high that the box office returns were never going to be good enough, which led to Warner Bros cancelling the planned sequel and the franchise was handed over to a certain Mr Zack Snyder; what could possibly go wrong?
‘Battleship’ (Peter Berg, 2012)<br>
The term ‘loosely based’ does a lot of heavy lifting in movie descriptions. For example, this 2012 sci-fi monstrosity was loosely based on the board game of the same name, because how else do you get a feature-length film out of a game about guessing random squares? Battleship is something of a punchline in the film community, and they somehow managed to wrangle Liam Neeson, Alexander Skarsgård, and Rihanna for an utterly dreadful story about a US warship going toe-to-toe with a fleet of aliens.
The big-name cast is just one of the reasons why this film cost a staggering $209million, alongside which, a CGI-heavy premise and troubled production almost led to the project’s cancellation, but Universal Pictures pushed through, deciding that scrapping it would lose them too much money. Weirdly enough, nobody was interested in a film based on a board game starring a singer who’d never acted before, and it instead ended up Universal losing around $150m, which was way more than if they’d just pulled the plug in the first place; talk about a sinking ship.
‘The Lone Ranger’ (Gore Verbinski, 2013)
The Walt Disney Company has been at the top of the movie game for a very long time because it’s always been incredibly savvy regarding its business decisions, but even the very best aren’t immune to making poor choices, as these next two entries will show. First up, we have The Lone Ranger, based on the iconic (and slightly problematic) tales of the Old West. This movie version starring Johnny Depp and ‘definitely-not-a-cannibal’ Armie Hammer was supposed to give the character a new lease on life, but instead it gave Disney one hell of a financial headache.
Once again, we have a production that dragged on for way too long for no good reason. Depp was first announced as Tonto in 2008, five years before the movie hit the big screen, and even with most of the key players taking a 20% salary cut, The Lone Ranger still cost an eye-watering $225million in 2013. Disney were very happy to splash ridiculous sums of money around during this period, as we’ll see in a bit, but there was absolutely no need to throw so much dough down the drain for a middling film mostly set in the desert.
‘John Carter’ (Andrew Stanton, 2012)
‘John Carter’ sounds like somebody you used to go to school with, but it’s actually one of the most infamous box office flops of all time. Based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the film transports Taylor Kitsch’s Civil War soldier to a desolate version of the planet Mars. The film was the brainchild of Pixar bigwig Andrew Stanton, who desperately wanted to adapt Burroughs’ work for the big screen, but while he succeeded in his goal, it came at a really, really high cost.
Most of John Carter was reshot several times over, which Stanton attributed to his background in animation, where everything is retouched and retooled constantly prior to release. Unfortunately, this was live-action, and reshoots aren’t cheap, which led to the final bill for John Carter to be $264million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $361m in today’s world, making John Carter one of the 20 most expensive movies ever made. To make matters worse, nobody even saw it, with estimates claiming that the film lost anywhere between $112 and $200m for the ‘House of Mouse’. Unsurprisingly, plans for a second and third movie were immediately canned, and today, nobody dares to even speak its name.
‘The Electric State’ (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2025)
The one thing everybody knows about The Electric State is how much it cost, for when it was revealed that the Russo brothers’ latest venture for Netflix was made to the tune of $320million, jaws hit the floor. This was a movie unattached to any previous franchise or series, based on an obscure graphic novel and set to receive a very limited theatrical release, and yet, it cost about the same as Avengers: Infinity War, who knows why.
The Electric State is set in the years following a war between humans and animatronics. There are a lot of colourful robot characters that inhabit the world, and they all look perfectly fine, but films like Gareth Edwards’ Monsters prove that you can have great VFX without breaking the bank. Even with a cast as stacked as this one, basically any famous actor you can think of is in it, there is no way it should have cost more than the GDP of some countries. At least Infinity War was a major cultural event, while everyone who saw The Electric State agreed that it was broadly fine. That’s $320m on a movie people forgot about almost as soon as they’d finished watching it, making for a disgusting waste.
