If $500 million won’t buy you the movie you want, then dumping another $500 million on the pile and lighting it on fire isn’t going to help any.
Putting it up the nose of all the cast and crew might.
I would go for a remake of Gone With the Wind with no CGI. Go all out but make it 6 hours long this time instead of 4. Instead of screening 10,000 actresses to find your Scarlet O’Hara, make it 30,000.
The battle references need to be more comprehensive and realistic as well. You are going to have to recreate Gettysburg, Antietam and Shiloh among many others in perfect period detail with tens of thousands of extras even if their contributions are brief.
Buy up a bunch of property in Atlanta, recreate it in period form and then burn it down. Hell, you could recreate large parts of Sherman’s march before that by buying up historical properties and then destroying them on screen with tons of gratuitous rape and pillaging thrown in for shock value.
The ending could be a Lady Gaga style musical production as performed by Scarlet O’Hara.
That is a moneymaker if I ever saw one.
Make Airworld, Fireworld and Earthworld.
It could get it a lot of naming rights. “The Godfather Part 7 Super Bowl”.
Film a real life Metalocalypse story arc.
You can’t spend a billion dollars on a movie. There’s no movie you could make that would cost you one billion dollars, unless you cheat by paying everyone on the set twenty times their real salary or, deliberately make an entire movie, throw it away, and then make another, etc. If you apply reasonable Brewster’s Million rules - you can’t give the money away or pay more for something than its true cost - you will have your movie made long before you spend a billion dollars.
Only 28 films have made more than a billion dollars, and that’s combining domestic and international. I can’t see a film studio budgeting that on a regular basis. Plus, it proves you don’t have to have a billion dollar budget to gross a billion dollars.
Y’know, it occurs to me that JAQ’s idea is awfully close to what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing: Make a whole bunch of movies, mostly separate but interconnected, with a bunch of different styles and themes.
A few more thoughts:
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Having a budget of this sort could enable the producers to make very detailed, expensive sets - for instance, if China won’t let you film in China, but you really want to film Tienanmen Square, you could construct a Tienanmen-Square like set.
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Same for props. You could build an honest-to-goodness fighter jet cockpit, or lease an actual Boeing 747 for scenes, or even film scenes in Earth orbit, that are actual video footage from the ISS, etc.
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This thread is hypothetical; so while obviously no studio in their right mind would spend a billion dollars on a movie, we could just hand-wave that away and say some generous billionaire steps in and writes a billion-dollar check prior to the beginning of production.
A few possibilities I thought of:
(1) Find out how much the city of Paris, France will charge to completely shut down the Eiffel Tower for weeks on end so you can film a lengthy and exciting action sequence there. Repeat at the Statue of Liberty, the Taj Mahal, etc.
(2) Decide that you want to make a movie about two cruise ships crashing into each other and sinking. Buy two cruise ships. Crash them into each other.
(3) Actually film in outer space. Or, as a fallback, film the whole thing in zero gravity inside airplanes making parabolic flights, 20 seconds at a time, but with dozens or hundreds of sets all built to fit into the airplane
(4) The film is meant to represent the worldview of someone with a fractured personality, so while there is always a “main” view of what’s going on in the center of the screen, there are dozens of smaller images around the outside representing his mood and imagination. Increase the production values and star power of the actors in the smaller images until the budget reaches $1B
Free popcorn upgrade experience!!!
I’d make a thousand movies.
You could film a [del]porno[/del] *“erotic thriller” *in space—at about, what, $50 million per passenger, going with the Russians? Or $100 mil per seat, for a circumlunar mission? Another company, like SpaceX, might be cheaper, once they get going with manned missions.—and spend most of the rest of the budget bribing the MPAA/BBFC/etc. to give it a mild rating, under the rationale that it’s “art” or a “scientific and historical record.”
Make a film without sin.
Thanks for the response everyone - but, as far as possible, I am not referring to frivolous or wasteful uses of money. I mean things that would be a productive use of money that could be applied to a movie - perhaps things that most Hollywood directors would like to do, but can’t, due to budgetary constraints.
I’d like to see M. Night Shyamalan somehow use up a billion dollars for a film - see how many multiple twist endings he can throw in.
Or maybe Roland Emmerich can make something with lots of White Houses and Capitol Buildings in it.
Ishtar 2?
Oh yes you could. I already volunteered to be the director that highlights the American Civil War in live action with high production musical interludes. That isn’t going to be cheap. I am not going to pull some hack job like James Cameron did when he only built half a Titanic clone to make a semi-historical movie. We are getting this one right down to the smallest detail.
I have another winner planned too. I don’t have the final script written yet but the opening sequence involves not 2 but 3! planes colliding in mid-air - a 747, an Airbus-380 and a B-2 bomber. Epic! I haven’t written what happens next but I promise you it will be great. Come to think of it, $1 billion isn’t going to cut it for this masterpiece. I am going to have to do some more fundraising.
You would have to make the movie as appealing to a mass market as possible, meaning nothing too deep or complex, and with as much violence and nudity as you can get away with without getting a R rating or a banning in China, because your audience will be teens, China, and teens in China.
Here - to get you started:
https://www.gofundme.com/creative-fundraising
Script doctoring suggestion: Can we get the Spruce Goose and a Concorde or two added to the mix?