The first movie to cost over $1million
When talking about some of the biggest films ever made, money stops becoming an object fairly quickly. As much as true artists can craft a masterpiece using the bare minimum, some of the most ambitious movies to come out of the last decade of cinema had to have at least a million dollars behind them to go from storyboard to screen. That gargantuan amount wasn’t always so big, but the first instance of Hollywood crossing that film threshold was almost too much for them to handle.
While it was never a race to see who could make the perfect million-dollar film, directors were already looking to expand their budget well past its constraints as far back as the silent movie era. As the technology became more sophisticated on movie sets, films were allocating massive amounts of money in their budget to ensure they could get their money back in the box office revenue.
Although the 1916 film Intolerance promised to be one of the most ambitious projects in Hollywood with a budget of $2million, it ultimately stalled out at a little over $300,000 once production had wrapped. That was only scratching the surface, though, and Hollywood would have another lavish film come out the same year entitled Daughter of the Gods, which inched closer to $800,000.
Once Hollywood finally had a movie that went into seven digits, they weren’t completely sold on what they had on their hands. In 1922, the silent film Foolish Wives became the first movie to surpass $1,000,000 for production, telling the tale of a man who rechristens himself Count Wladislaw Sergius Karamzin to woo rich women at the famous Monte Carlo.
Though the concept seemed novel at the time, the only problem that got in the way was the run length of the picture. As opposed to audiences getting up in arms about the overblown runtimes in blockbuster films, Foolish Wives was originally slated to run from anywhere between six to ten hours, with director Erich von Stroheim suggesting that the film be screened over two separate evenings.
After being paired down significantly by the studio, Foolish Wives would become synonymous with its extravagant price, with some ads for the film including the phrase “The First Million Dollar Picture” to sell the movie. As the silent era ended, though, much more extravagant films were already on the rise.
Only a short time after Foolish Wives came out, the epic Ben Hur became one of the most extravagant films ever made in the silent era, costing over $3million to get off the ground and being able to keep their runtime an equally extravagant three and half hours. For inflation today, the cost of Ben Hur equates to roughly $52million if it were in production in 2023.
Then again, this allowed movies only to get bigger after the silent era, with directors coming up with grand visions that involved different pieces of technology to get correct, like the impressive visuals that would come in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The glamorous side of Hollywood was never going to be cheap by any means, but this marked the moment it went from the home for major films to a financial institution.
