I’ve seen enough of the TV show and heard enough of the movie described to me to know it’s not substantially different.
So I see Borat took in about 9.2m on the opening weekend. I find myself curious as to how good that is, for a somewhat non-mainstream comedy. It’s 6m above 2nd place, but I guess it really doesn’t have any competition.
The movie must’ve been dirt cheap to make, though, so I’m sure it’s showing a profit already. It’s always nice to see somewhat quirky movies succeed.
Woops, shows how much I know. I was looking at the week to date stats rather than opening weekend stats. It made 26.4m, which has to be several times its budget.
Budget 18 mil, expected to do around 10 opening weekend- way above anyones expectations- luckily Borat will not be execute.
But he had to have the ass of a 300 lb. man in his face, so however much money makes, one wonders if it was worth it.
I wonder how they spent that much? That’s gotta include $10mm up front for Mr. Cohen and healthy salaries for everyone else or something, because it looked like a $300,000 movie.
I still smell your testes on my mustache.
(I agree, seems like the film could’ve been done for under 3 million. Salaries?)
Bringing a film crew to Albania can’t be cheap.
Couple grand, maybe? It’s a film crew, not a film army. $18,000,000.00 is a lot of money.
I suspect that a lot of that budget includes marketing costs. There was a lot of advertising for this film.
Maybe that was 18 mil in Kazakh money? 
It costs a “couple grand” to send me to a conference. I suspect it costs more to send a film crew halfway around the world.
I just got back from the movie, and I have to agree. There were some parts that were very funny, both staged (bear in the ice cream truck - or just the fact that he was driving around in an ice cream truck) and probably unstaged (Bob Barr; the comedy coach who really knew his stuff… NOT!). The scenes where he was just making people uncomfortable, instead of letting assholes be assholes, sometimes fell flat for me. (The hotel clerk who practically ran away was great, though.) I don’t think this movie was as original or insightful as people have implied, but it’s a funny movie with some great scenes.
Yeah, that’s all I was saying. I find the guy somewhat amusing, but I don’t think he’s brilliant or anything. He’s a good actor and has balls of steel, but that doesn’t make him a genius.
I went in expecting a funny comedy and that’s exactly what I got. Sacha Baron Cohen is a very intelligent and well-educated person so I think the “genius” is something that bleeds through rather than something he wedges in forcefully. It’s a comedy first, though. Saying you don’t like it because it isn’t as erudite as you hoped it would be is sort of like saying you’re not impressed with a blue whale because you expected it to have bigger antlers.
I didn’t say I didn’t like it, nor did I expect it to be “erudite.”
FWIW, I like the show, I laughed my ass off at the move, and I’m looking forward to the Bruno movie … and I agree with everything Walter Windchill said.
“Genius” IMO is reserved for someone who does really innovative or original work. He is fantastic at what he does, but at this point it’s all he does, and it’s not that new.
For $26 million I’d let a 300-pound man shit on my head.
Big surprise- the frat boys are suing Borat for making them look bad :rolleyes:
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20061110/D8LA7R8G0.html
But from a legal standpoint, is it fraud if you sign a release stating this is for viewing on overseas, when in reality that is not the case?
That’s where some of that 18 million dollars went.