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Stacy Conradt
The Quick 10: The 10 Most Expensive Movies Ever
by Stacy Conradt - June 9, 2008 - 4:07 PM

We’re getting into summer blockbuster season – Hancock, The Incredible Hulk, WALL-E, Get Smart (which I am so excited for), The Love Guru, The Dark Knight – there are definitely a lot of options. But none of them even come close to making the top 10 priciest movies list. This list does consider inflation.

The 10 Most Expensive Movies Ever

1. War and Peace – 1968 – $560,000,000
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – 2007 – $300,000,000
3. Cleopatra – 1963 – $295,000,000
4. Spider-Man 3 – 2007 – $258,000,000
5. Titanic – 1997 – $247,000,000
6. Waterworld – 1995 – $238,089,566.93
7. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – 2003 – $216,400,000
8. X-Men: The Last Stand – 2006 – $210,000,000
9. Spider-Man 2 – 2004 – $210,000,000
10. Superman Returns – 2006 – $209,000,000

If you ignore inflation, though, you’d drop War and Peace, Cleopatra, Waterworld, T3 and X-Men 3. Then add in Quantum of Solace, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, King Kong (2005), Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

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Comments (11)

  1. Cool list! Why such an exact price on Waterworld?

    posted by TomH on 6-9-2008 at 2:37 pm

  2. Is the WaterWorld price just to make sure we are paying attention?

    I guess if I were a stuiod exec I would probably want to know exactly how many pennies I lost on that bomb.

    posted by Witty Nickname on 6-9-2008 at 3:19 pm

  3. Wasn’t War and Peace released in 1956?

    posted by Reed on 6-9-2008 at 3:23 pm

  4. How much is Quantum of Solace budgeted for? Sounds weird that a Bond movie would be cracking this list.

    posted by EMStoveken on 6-9-2008 at 3:36 pm

  5. It would be interesting to see how much money each of those films has earned. I would bet at least a few of them haven’t lived up to the cost.

    posted by Justin on 6-9-2008 at 4:13 pm

  6. I think that the W&P on the list refers to the Russian version, which came out in 1967 and was released in the US in 1968. It’s about seven hours long and used 120,000 extras, so there’s your money.

    posted by Dan on 6-9-2008 at 4:16 pm

  7. It’s funny that such a number of these high-budget movies are sequals. Guess it tells you something about the mentality of the movie industry. :D

    posted by Allison on 6-9-2008 at 6:24 pm

  8. I think the sequels jack up the price not only because the audience is going to want bigger and better, they’ll also want more of the same. So to secure the same stars/director/screenwriter, the asking price goes up for all parties.

    I think when Tobey Maguire signed on for Spider-Man 1, he also signed up for #2 at a comparatively low price. It took him faking (or over-emphasizing) a back injury to get up to an 8 digit salary and get the 9th most expensive movie ever made.

    posted by Kevin on 6-10-2008 at 10:00 am

  9. I liked Waterworld.

    Compared with Terminator 3 and Xmen 3 it was genius.

    posted by hannah on 6-10-2008 at 11:32 am

  10. Interesting that some of the most expensive ones are relatively new. And people say Hollywood is having problems because of downloads…

    posted by Yasser on 6-10-2008 at 12:16 pm

  11. Are we just counting US blockbusters,
    because if not, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis would have to be around $350.000.000 (cost 7 million reich mark in 1927) and be t 2nd place.

    posted by R_oSS on 6-12-2008 at 6:19 pm

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