4 ms·
It's staggering to think that this TV show might cost well over $2 billion. We are approaching numbers typically used only of events like the Manhattan Project
by gwern 6y ago
It's staggering to think that this TV show might cost well over $2 billion. We are approaching numbers typically used only of events like the Manhattan Project or Apollo.
Considering that movies and shows still get made about those and the apparently exponential growth of budgets, it seems likely that at some point, there will have been more money spent cumulatively on shows about the MP or Apollo than on the actual historical event. And at some point afterwards, there will be more spent on a single show about them than the actual event.
- lumost 6y agoIf more money is spent making a show about Apollo than the actual Apollo missions - why not film them on location?
- xiphias2 6y agoTom Cruise is going to space for a reason
- wmf 6y agoSomeone once joked that if Kubrick had been asked to fake the moon landings he would have insisted on filming on the moon for maximum realism. The main problem is probably cost disease; if you tried to recreate any Apollo missions today it would cost you more (adjusted for inflation even) that it originally did.
- SilasX 6y ago"Cost disease" generally refers to the phenomenon of things becoming (relatively) more expensive because of the unavoidable human-labor component, but the Apollo missions would be more expensive for other reasons, or other requirements that necessitate human labor where said requirements didn't exist before.
- orwin 6y agoyeah, the cost of human life is significantly higher than what it used to be.
- Gibbon1 6y agoMy joke was the cost of faking the moon landing was too high. 100% of GDP from 1960 to 1970. And then the estimated cost for the 'Kubrick Plan B' was too high. So they sent two air force test pilots up with home movie cameras to film each other on the moon. Lame!
- burlesona 6y agoSadly, this puts in perspective where our priorities are.
- fsloth 6y agoApollo program cost $200 billion. Still few orders of magnitdude to go. Manhattan $23 billion so closer. $2 billion is not that much in corporate world (sure, for me as an individual it is) - given a mediums sized mobile game studio can generate that amount of revenue in a year.
- detaro 6y agoApollo project was 20-something billion in 60s/70s dollars, equivalent to 150-200 billion now.
- mchusma 6y agoReid Hoffman has talked about this quite a bit. So if this is a 13 hour season, at $500m, that is about $40M per hour. Big budget movies can be easily over $100M per hour.
- ksec 6y agoExactly this. More companies are spending more money and making more shows than ever. So much could be done, so many more innovation to be made. And here we are. Apple and Amazon. Sigh. One of the very good thing about these media is that they consume "the" fundamental unit we cant earn; Time. Which means we can only watch as much as we have time for. Edit: I mean if we could spend $2B making this, surely it isn't too much to ask for a re- film the last 2/3 season of Game of Thrones once the books is finished. Or even the last season would be good enough for me.
- scsilver 6y agoTheres hardly any red tape in our imaginations. Much easier to build up in there.