Are the people talking about this for real, or just B.S.-ing us?
Haven't people figured out by now that the bloated budgets were one big reason for why traditional animated films died out in the US?
I never understood the business of budgeting these films at $80 million on up when the returns were indicating most of these films were not earning more than the neighborhood of $100 million.
There's almost no way a $400 million animated film will make its money back in first-run theaters.
Your better bet is that Jesus Christ will return or a meteor will hit the Earth! :idea:
While I admire Stigwood's "If you are going to do it, you've got to do it right" attitude, I have no clue whatsoever where all of that money will go in this project. Does anyone else know? I hope he puts as much thought into the project as he is money.
Really, why in the world would they need a $400 million dollar budget??
If animated films as technically advanced as Shrek 2, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, ect. didn't need budgets that large, why in the hell would a production of "Tommy" need one?!?
Maybe he's exploring the abandoned idea of bringing of their lost album "Lifehouse" to the big screen as well, as well as bringing "Quadrophenia" to the screen. Something else besides an animated film has to be going on here,
Apparently, the guy who wants to produce the animated "Tommy" has never produced an animated film in his career.
Not an encouraging bit of news at all.
And there's no way any sane person should be budgeting $400 million for ANY kind of movie. This is just plain nuts and no sane person is going to commit that kind of money to a movie
using a $400 Million budget is the "right way" to do a cartoon he must be blind, deaf, and especially dumb.
Quadrophenia. I once went to a theater that was showing a revival of that movie. It showed an old trailer for it. Everyone in the audience laughed at it and shook their heads. I heard one guy say, "To think people thought that was COOL back then."
but we've gotta understand that a lot of films made in the late 1960s and 1970s were "experimental films" meant to be enjoyed to stoned-out crowds. So if you're NOT a stoner or toker of any sort of illegal drug, of course you're not going to like these films!
(My own personal theory is that drugs just make you dumber. I've never bought into the nonsense of altered states of minds producing superior artistic output. If anything, most of what I've seen and read about drug-users is that their productivity and creativity are FAR LOWER than people who DON'T use drugs.)
Tons of these drug exploitation/drug humor films are crap. As bad as a lot of the wholesome amalgamated family-friendly TV and movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were, they at least had some kind of plot and logic to them.
I really can't sit through a Cheech & Chong movie and even some of the original SNL (1975-1980) skits are pretty bad and meaningless today. We just don't see a lot of the really bad original SNL skits because Lorne Michaels and his editing teams have cut out a lot of the drug humor and skits that bombed badly. There were a couple of banned SNL episodes (pulled from syndication circulation by Michaels) that just got shown again on TV for the first time in nearly 30 years, and, boy, were they bad!
As it is, original SNL didn't play very long on E! Entertainment before it got yanked off the schedule. It just didn't get good ratings on E! and so 1990s/early 21st Century SNL got rotated back onto E! as soon as Comedy Central's exclusive deal to later SNL episodes expired.
It's sad to think that people prefer Chris Kattan, Will Ferrell, Horatio Sanz, and (especially the feckless) Jimmy Fallon to Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner, but that's how comedy tastes have changed.
(My own personal theory is that drugs just make you dumber. I've never bought into the nonsense of altered states of minds producing superior artistic output. If anything, most of what I've seen and read about drug-users is that their productivity and creativity are FAR LOWER than people who DON'T use drugs.)
Seriously, I don't think that $400m budget will stick. Not unless he's counting in doing some major brand spending on it, launching a Broadway show at the same time, or something.
Could be that it's his entire spend on everything (including P&A), but it's still $150-200m way over if that!
Also, this is going to be a very specialised audience demo here. You're not going to get your Shrek/Incredibles families going to this one!
If it happens, my guess is a B.O. take of between $30-$80m tops, if that.
I once went to a theater that was showing a revival of that movie. It showed an old trailer for it. Everyone in the audience laughed at it and shook their heads. I heard one guy say, "To think people thought that was COOL back then." 
