The most expensive movie ever made
For thousands of years, art was a stationary image and then out of nowhere, you had people dodging trains that were seemingly steaming towards them. Cinema was a shiny new cultural frontier, and the world hadn’t seen anything like it. By 1946, roughly 60% of the American population were going to the cinema once a week—most of what they watched came from Hollywood.
At its prime, it was practically printing money. It had become the cultural outpost of a generation. The world was in a horrible place following the scourge of war, and cinema offered a cheap and easy outlet for escapism. These wholesome stories were flashy enough to fill you with wonder for a few hours and all they cost was a handful of change.
However, in 1963, they were beginning to lose their prominent top spot in culture. By this stage, music had well and truly joined the pop culture revolution. With household TV ownership also rapidly rising, cinema attendance began to dwindle. Cleopatra was 20th Century Studios’ gamble to reignite the medium. With Walter Wanger onboard as producer, they decided to risk it all and throw a huge budget at a picture that harked back to the must-see glory days of cinema.
When Cleopatra’s budget is adjusted for inflation, it remains the most expensive film ever made, which is utterly remarkable when you consider the intergalactic expanse of the current film industry. Fox studios had originally set out a considerable $2million for the project’s budget. Half of that would be taken up by Elizabeth Taylor’s record-setting salary alone, and before a single frame had been shot, the film was already $2 million over budget.
Production hardly got more streamlined after that. Not long into proceedings, with only a couple of scenes in the can, director Rouben Mamoulian was sacked, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz was brought in to replace him. Following this debacle, Liz Taylor fell ill, and filming was suspended. Then elaborate sets built in London were completely abandoned as filming relocated to Rome and so on, and so on… All leading to an exorbitant rise in costs. However, at this point, it was passed the point of return, and the studio had no choice but to double down.
In the end, the great lumbering epic was somehow slashed from six hours to three and remained coherent. Ultimately, it might have cost the studio a fraction over $42million more than its original budget, but thanks to its sheer star power and the amount of fevered discussion surrounding it, victory was snatched from the looming jaws of defeat, and the studio was spared bankruptcy by its triumphant, troublesome, ugly duckling.
When you adjust the figures for inflation in 2023, the film comes in at a whopping $433,112,125, which eclipses 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which cost $422million. And as for Taylor’s fee, that now stacks up at $9,776,797. It says a lot for the film itself, however, that from the hellfire of this production, it managed to make a profit. The fanfare surrounding it was prescient of the pop culture profiteering of cooking up a storm to boot.
