Why was Tangled so expensive to make?

Cafe Society
#1

I just read Tangled was the second most expensive movie ever made in history. (The most expensive was Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.) And my question is how?

Okay, it was CGI animated. But dozens of movies have been made that way- it’s not a new technology. And the animation on Tangled didn’t seem significantly different than what I’ve seen before.

And other than that, what? There was no rights to purchase and no major stars in the cast. Disney’s obviously not new to the business - they know how how to organize a animated feature production.

So where did $260,000,000 go?

On an unrelated question, the end credits had scenes from the story as background. But there was one scene of Flynn and Rapunzel meeting a monkey dressed up like a fortune teller who was reading a crystal ball. There was nothing like that in the movie. Was it from some deleted scene?

#2

It took about ten years of multiple aborted attempts, each of which got quite far into it before they scrapped everything and started again. Imagine half a regular animated film budget, but spent three or four separate times.

#3

Also, animating the hair was a bitch. There was a really good article I read about it, but I forget where…

#4

I thought Avatar was the most expensive?

#5

Perhaps “expensive movie” has become an selling point and execs do some creatieve budgeting to plump up the numbers?

#6

Wig budget.

#7

Red Bull for Mandy Moore. The girl just runs on it!

#8

Yeah, back when it was called “Rapunzel,” starred Kristen Chenoweth, and was being rendered with non-photorealistic-rendering patterned after Pre-Raphaelite art, I was excited for it.

#9

I thought it was pretty good. Not up at the level of The Lion King or Lilo and Stitch but better than The Princess and the Frog or Home on the Range. I did feel the musical numbers were weak.

#10

I so would have loved that movie. I am sad that it will never exist.

I *liked *Tangled, but I think I would have liked the earlier version better.

#11

Me too!

#12

Also inflation. It’s rather fascinating to see how adjusted dollars affects movie numbers. For example, Gone with the Wind is actually the highest grossing movie of all time. Iirc, it had 120 million ticket sales, which would be well over 1 billion dollars today in the US alone. Also in adjusted dollars, I believe the Russian production of War and Peace was $700 million in adjusted dollars.

Adjusted gross: http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
Adjusted cost: http://achieverwiki.standardbank.co.za/content/top-ten-most-expensive-movies-ever-made-adjusted-inflation

It’s actually quite sickening how movie studios will pull any trick out of their ass just to increase sales, like fake critics, false advertising, etc.

#13

Ben Lyons would do that for free and a little pat on the head.

#14

“Rapunzel Unbraided” no less, which I think is a fantastic title.

Still, I think they did the right thing to boost the funny. As pretty as it may have been stylistically, the humour really makes it what it became.