You guys can use any criteria for “ambitious” that you want. Failure or success, it’s all interesting. There are some very interesting projects that have been mentioned.
I’m sticking with my original answer (LOTR films) whether you choose finances, logistics, or artistic goals as criteria. It’s easy to forget after 10 years what a risky project it was, in many ways. Agreed that older spectacles had more extras, but LOTR had quite a few. Dozens or real horses and riders in the Ride of the Rohirimm scene, along with the computer generated ones.
How about Pirates of the Carribean? Making what ended up as 4 mega-blockbuster films based off a a goofy Disney theme park ride. Especially given that the last attempt at a big budget pirate film in decades had been the disasterous Cutthroat Island.
Titanic was really ambiguous financially, artistically, and logistically. It was so expensive to make at $300 million that financial success was far from assured and it could have easily been one of the biggest flops in history if audiences didn’t like real-life history overlaid with a romance story. The story of Jack and Rose had to be woven in with real life details and people carefully to achieve the right balance of realism and fiction. It had to appeal to history buffs and teenage girls but not just those groups because that would not have been enough for long-term financial success of a movie that expensive. The ending was also risky because although everyone knew what happened to the real ship, the Jack and Rose story gave no indication that it would also end tragically.
James Cameron had to build a model of the Titanic at 90% scale (1 sided only) to use as a gigantic set with every detail carefully researched and as true to the original as possible. Massive water tanks were required to shoot the water scenes.
It may not be the most ambitious movie in every category but it is near the top in many of them and certainly had the most success despite the huge risks.
This was what I was going to say.
Lest we forget, Star Wars was also very ambitious, especially with respect to its special effects.
True, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is just as visually realistic and stunning, and it was done nine years before Star Wars. (Star Wars did innovate with fx for things other than simply “spaceships” – space weaponry effects, etc.).
Fascinating thread, and I agree with it all. I’d never heard of Dau, but wow! It’s like that Jim Carrey/Peter Weir film IRL! (I’d only heard of Kharkov before as the likely epicenter of the region where Proto-Indo-European was spoken).
To the list of “ambitious failures” we could add Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote. Not quite as massive as some others in this thread, but worthy of a passing mention.
Oh God. This like asking “What is the fattiest food?”
Ambiguous? 