It’s on telly now and although some of the effects/sets are a bit corny overall it looks like it cost millyuns to make. How much did it cost in today’s money?
By the way, that Eisenhower guy looked more like Eisenhower than Eisenhower did.
Bump.
According to the IMDb, the budget for The Longest Day was $10 million. That was in 1962. If you can find out what the inflation rate is between the 1962 dollar and the 2008 dollar, you can determine how much the $10 million would be in today’s money.
About $70 million in 2008 dollars. That may not sound like a big budget, but for the time it was pretty enormous. Movies didn’t typically cost as much to make even accounting for inflation.
Adjusted for inflation, I believe the most expensive movie of all time is still Cleopatra, which was made the year after “The Longest Day” and cost over $40 million to make at the time; I believe it pushed $300 million in today’s dollars. It nearly killed off the studio.
You could argue the Soviet “War and Peace” of 1968 was even costlier, but I don’t know that it counts as one movie (it’s like eight hours long.)
It’s pretty impressive what they did with the money. Were stars paid proportionately less in those days than now? To get a similar “all-star” cast now would probably be unfeasible.
Back then stars did not make as much as they do now. I think that was just after the end of the “studio system” where stars were told what movies to make and they only worked for 1 studio. But it was before the big money paydays for stars too.