What is the most expensive movie that was never released?
Often, as we’ve seen with James Cameron’s Avatar, big ideas often require deep pockets.
It’s not cheap to make any movie, even the so-called budget ones that require one person and a secondhand camera. And when you factor everything else around it, like marketing, promotion, and paying people the right pay, things surely start to add up.
The problem for many filmmakers is that there’s a huge appetite for those mega Blockbuster epics, with audiences latching onto anything with big tech and extensive visual effects, even better when the story itself has its all-American us-versus-them narrative, and it’s easy to understand why, because Marvel is a living example of such successes, offering fantasy-filled escapism that gives us a break from the mundanity of everyday life.
The movie with the highest-ever budget, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, is also proof of this: costing around $447million, The Force Awakens had it all – high-profile actors, cutting-edge tech, and a massive marketing budget to ensure its success, not that it needed to do much anyway to pull audiences in – but regardless, JJ Abrams pulled out all the stops.
Other big-budget movies, like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and Cleopatra, also raked in the big bucks to pull off big ideas, often by utilising the best and most modern visual tech to make sure the audiences were well and truly wowed.
What is the most expensive movie that was never released?
And, of course, we all know why Cameron’s Avatar and Titanic required such deep pockets. Beyond his need to create hard-hitting stories that stay with you forever, Cameron seems to be on his own personal mission to create major Blockbuster after major Blockbuster, with no idea too big when it comes to passion projects or intensive interests he wants to explore on the big screen.
In fact, the success of Avatar spurred the creation of China’s very own response to Cameron’s sci-fi epic with a movie that was set to be titled Empires of the Deep. Created initially by billionaire Jon Jiang, Empires of the Deep was intended as a mermaid, us-versus-them epic with a big, Avatar-level impact and no signs of failure – but it never made it to the big screen at all.
Several setbacks made it seem like an uphill battle, though, including copious amounts of script changes and a struggle to cast the lead actor. Olga Kurylenko was eventually brought on board and was reportedly paid $1million for an unreleased movie. The film was originally set at a $50m budget, but this quickly increased to an insane $130m, while Jiang actually poured everything into it, becoming the next major picture – including hiring Cameron’s collaborator, Randall Frakes, and then later, Steven Spielberg’s collaborator, Michael Kahn.
However, due to funding and investment issues, and likely a hefty amount of people not really believing in it becoming the next Avatar-type success, the film flopped – literally and figuratively, never making it to the big screen, despite all that money and hard work. Suppose it’s anyone’s guess whether it would have been successful, but looking at the images available, it doesn’t look promising.
