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Of all the places to pick up movie news, I grabbed this off of What Would Tyler Durden Do?, one of my favorite pop culture sites. They are commenting on a report from Radar Online, who is claiming that Spider-Man 3 has cost Sony over $500 million dollars to make. While this really wouldn’t surprise me, it is notable. Here is what the Radar Online report had to say:

As production dragged on into late summer—it had been scheduled to conclude in June—stories about the project’s ballooning budget started popping up all over town. But in the end, even the most hyperbolic of observers may have underestimated the final tab. Industry insiders claim that Sony spent $350 million or more on production alone. With marketing and promotion factored in, the total price tag will approach half a billion dollars—positioning Spider-Man 3 as the most expensive movie of all time. (Cleopatra, the 1963 epic that has long held the title of priciest picture, had an inflation-adjusted budget of $290 million.)

It goes with out saying that you have to spend money to make money, but $500 million? That is a bit excessive. That would make Spider-Man 3 almost 2.5 times more expensive than Spider-Man 2, which grossed $784 million world-wide in 2004. The industry expectations around this latest installment into the Spidey franchise is somewhere around $800 million, so turning a profit is not going to be hard, but one must ask why this film cost so much? Isn’t most of it CG? And with plans for 3 more films, will they continue to become exponentially more expensive?

I don’t predict that this will be the last of the big budget blockbusters for 2007 either. Dreamworks is yet to report how much Michael Bay has spent to bring Transformers to life and Disney is saying that Pirates 3 only cost $200 mil. Combine these two with Rise of the Silver Surfer and we’ve got ourselves over a billion dollars spent on blockbusters this year. The only question that remains is whether Hollywood will see a huge return on it’s multi-billion dollar investment? Beginning May 4 with Spider-Man 3, we shall see…

Tags: spider-man 3, big budget, blockbuster, movies, sony