A multi-million mouser: the most expensive moustache in cinema history
In theory, a moustache is hardly going to be a massive expense for a movie production. An actor either grows one on their top lip, or the props department cobbles one together that gets glued onto their face for the duration of production. Simple. Job done.
There’s also the fact that unless any film calls for a gargantuan handlebar or a mouser created for a deliberately comedic effect, they also tend to be fairly small. It’s one of the most minuscule cogs in an operation that spans years from development to release and enlists hundreds of hardworking creatives along the way.
And yet, one fiscally irresponsible slab of facial furniture found itself at the centre of a contractual storm, which ultimately necessitated a bill that ran into the millions. Should a moustache cost seven figures in the grand scheme of things? Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. However, it did, and something is going to have to go seriously wrong for it to be eclipsed as cinema’s most expensive tache.
For his role as government assassin August Walker in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Henry Cavill was required to sport a flavour saver on his top lip. So far, so simple. Cameras began rolling on the franchise’s sixth instalment in April 2017, and the actor went about becoming a thorn in Tom Cruise’s side without incident.
However, in July of that year, Cavill was contractually obligated to take part in reshoots for comic book blockbuster Justice League, and everyone knows that Superman doesn’t look like prime Tom Selleck. A compromise needed to be reached, especially when director Christopher McQuarrie refused to use a fake one in his film because it didn’t suit the lenses he was using.
“The suggestion was made through channels that we shave the moustache, and Henry could begin to grow the moustache back and that then they would give us the resources to digitally fill in Henry’s moustache,” he explained to Empire. “Because, like it or not, a fake moustache in closeup on a 75mm lens is never going to look like anything but a fake moustache.”
After crunching the numbers, McQuarrie determined that $3million would be a fair fee to receive from Justice League studio Warner Bros to shut down and avoid moustache-gate, but the Mission: Impossible backers had other ideas. “Somebody from Paramount Pictures said, ‘What is going on? What are you people even talking about?'” he said. “They’re like, ‘There’s no way we’re going to do that’. We were just like, ‘OK’. That was the best plan that we could come up with.”
Ironically, after that diplomatic suggestion was thrown out of the window, it ended up costing Warner Bros significantly more than $3million to digitally erase Cavill’s moustache from every shot he was in that was captured during reshoots. The end result was a most garish monstrosity that sits among the most egregious offences ever committed by CGI.
How much does a tache typically cost? Probably less than a quid from the joke shop. And yet, thanks to the calamitous nature of Justice League, it was millions in this case.
