District 9 costs 30 mill to make. Elysium cost 100 mil to make. Why?

Inflation. Salaries (big names in this one). Post workflow - D9 was Red One and EX1's if I remember, E is pretty much all Epic/Anamorphic/5K.

Maybe they mastered at 4K for CGI/VFX and kept the whole chain 4K (rather than 2K). If so, there's a cost implication there.

All told, a mixture of moving up the scale... and 'movie-flation' (the bigger you are, the larger budgets become - look at Gore V's stuff).

However, at $100K, it's still cheap in comparison to other (similar) movies.
 
Derek Chingwell said:
Inflation. Salaries (big names in this one). Post workflow - D9 was Red One and EX1's if I remember, E is pretty much all Epic/Anamorphic/5K.

Maybe they mastered at 4K for CGI/VFX and kept the whole chain 4K (rather than 2K). If so, there's a cost implication there.

All told, a mixture of moving up the scale... and 'movie-flation' (the bigger you are, the larger budgets become - look at Gore V's stuff).

However, at $100K, it's still cheap in comparison to other (similar) movies.
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My understanding is the difference in gear you're talking about would change the budget by maybe 1-10% which would be about 3 mill tops, not 70 million dollars.
 
It's a movie about the disparities between the haves and the have nots, and they spent an extra 70 million to make it. That extra 70 mil had to go somewhere.
 
Matt Damon & Jodie Foster salaries are huge. And I bet Neill Blomkamp's salary went up a lot since directing District 9, as well.

The odd part is that District 9 was a MUCH better movie.
 
Gillvane said:
My understanding is the difference in gear you're talking about would change the budget by maybe 1-10% which would be about 3 mill tops, not 70 million dollars.
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It's not just a difference in gear, but the data pipeline involved to produce CGI/VFX at 4K. Rendering CGI at 2K is intensive work for a renderfarm... rendering all those passes at 4K is exponentially more expensive.

Also, if the crew is X3 larger, and it takes X3 longer to shoot - well, that's a lot of $$ there too.

However, I don't know if they mastered all VFX at 4K - they could have done it all at 2K and spent the rest on craft services, as Batutta suggested :)
 
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Derek Chingwell said:
It's not just a difference in gear, but the data pipeline involved to produce CGI/VFX at 4K. Rendering CGI at 2K is intensive work for a renderfarm... rendering all those passes at 4K is exponentially more expensive.

Also, if the crew is X3 larger, and it takes X3 longer to shoot - well, that's a lot of $$ there too.

However, I don't know if they mastered all VFX at 4K - they could have done it all at 2K and spent the rest on craft services, as Batutta suggested :)
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I"m thinking they ate really well on Elysium.
 
Jaime Valles said:
Matt Damon & Jodie Foster salaries are huge. And I bet Neill Blomkamp's salary went up a lot since directing District 9, as well.

The odd part is that District 9 was a MUCH better movie.
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Here's the thing. If you make Elysium for 30 mill it's a great movie. Makes it's money back in the first weekend, and everything else is gravy. For 100 mil? It has to do 150 mill in box office to turn a profit. District 9 didn't make 150 mil.
 
Gillvane said:
Here's the thing. If you make Elysium for 30 mill it's a great movie. Makes it's money back in the first weekend, and everything else is gravy. For 100 mil? It has to do 150 mill in box office to turn a profit. District 9 didn't make 150 mil.
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D9 made $210m worldwide.
 
Oh, I'm not talking about success at the box office, or recouping the budget. I mean that, as a film, District 9 was way better storytelling. It had more engaging characters and a much less predictable plot.

I'm sure Elysium will likely end up making more money than District 9, simply because of the names of Matt Damon & Jodie Foster. But that doesn't make it a better movie. Not by a long shot.
 
Jaime Valles said:
Matt Damon & Jodie Foster salaries are huge. And I bet Neill Blomkamp's salary went up a lot since directing District 9, as well.
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don't forget that sneaky-looking dude who played Drama's agent on Entourage. He wants his cut too.

As for the $$ difference, I think it's pretty much been answered. For better or worse, I think comparatively speaking Elysium is a bigger film. Bigger stars & salaries, bigger sets, more locations, more extras & action going on. It doesn't seem like a head-scratcher. And inflation. Oh yes, inflation.
 
Craft services was a big one for sure. On District 9, they probably didn't have to feed the aliens, but Elysium had tons of human extras.
 
On the production side I'm sure the crew is larger and getting paid better on Elysium. Twenty people staying at a motel (or home) costs less than 100 people staying in hotels and having trailers on set. The other side of it could also be marketing. I don't remember constant TV ads for District 9.
 
$30 million in 2009 is probably more like $40 million today in Hollywood's world, plus another $40-45 million for Damon/Foster/Blomkamp, and then add another $5-8 million for the added strain of 4k post-workflow (if that is the route they went). So that is about $93 on the conservative side...the rest was spent on craft services!
 
Andrius Simutis said:
On the production side I'm sure the crew is larger and getting paid better on Elysium. Twenty people staying at a motel (or home) costs less than 100 people staying in hotels and having trailers on set. The other side of it could also be marketing. I don't remember constant TV ads for District 9.
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The production budget does not include marketing. It was 100 mil to produce, PLUS marketing.
 
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