The first movie with a $100 million budget
With the rise of big-budget franchises spilling out of Marvel and Disney and seemingly promising major financial rewards, studios are now injecting more money into movie productions than ever before.
With Star Wars: The Force Awakens costing around $447million to make and Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame boasting a combined budget of over $1 billion, the idea of a $100m budget now sounds relatively unimpressive. But just 30 years ago, this was a threshold that was still to be crossed.
In the mid-1990s, the Los Angeles Times reported that the average price to make and market a feature film had reached $50.4m. In 1994, James Cameron doubled that figure with his action comedy True Lies.
Starring blockbuster heavyweight Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Bill Paxton, the action comedy follows a US government spy that is lying to his family about his occupation. Cameron and Schwarzenegger had previously collaborated on the innovative sci-fi franchise, Terminator, which catapulted them both into Hollywood stardom.
True Lies marked Cameron’s first release after securing a multi-million dollar deal with 20th Century Fox, and it also became the first film to be made on a triple-figure budget. True Lies reportedly cost around $100-120m to produce.
Cameron would go on to obfuscate questions and speculation about the budget. During a past interview, Cameron joked, “I’ll put it in really clear perspective, this is how much the film costs: $7.50 plus parking – $8 in New York”.
When the director was asked about the rumoured figure of $120m, he responded: “It’s $200 million. I just wanted to see if you’d buy that, too. If people buy $120 [million], why not $200 [million]? How about a quarter billion?”
Despite pressing, Cameron stuck to his guns and refused to reveal the figure, instead emphasising the importance of assessing films on their content. He said: “It’s just always been my policy never to discuss budgets. It’s a pointless exercise to review a movie in terms of its budget. A film should be reviewed based on whether it’s successful at its stated goals. A film usually states its goals within the first act, and it either succeeds or fails based on what it’s trying to do – or based on what you want it to be doing, which are two different subjects.”
Against Cameron’s wishes, he has become widely associated with ambitious big-budget blockbusters. After his first $100m budget project gained a positive reception, he followed it up with Titanic, which doubled the budget and became the first film to gross over a billion dollars. It secured the title of the highest-grossing film of all time for over a decade, only overtaken by Cameron’s next offering, the futuristic sci-fi Avatar.
It’s no surprise, then, that it was Cameron who pushed movie budget figures into the triple digits. Over the last 30 years, he has remained a driving force behind the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood.
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