“James Bond: Spectre” Has Insane Budget of Well over $300 Million (€241 Million)

Leaked emails reveal Sony’s concern on over-inflated budget

Holy Batman James Bond! Shortly after the eagerly anticipated announcement for the 24^th James Bond movie, officially called “Spectre” and scheduled for release in December 2015, the film is raising plenty of eyebrows online because of a detail included in one of the leaked emails from the Sony hack.

The film is being produced by MGM Studios and will be distributed by Sony, which is probably also footing a large chunk of the bill for the production costs. And they’re no trifle, because one email indicates it might just be one of the most expensive movies ever made.

“Spectre” costs upwards of $300 million (€241 million) to make

In one email, MGM Studios President Jonathan Glickman wrote to his people that they must come up with new ways to cut costs for the estimated budget of the 24^th James Bond film, because under no circumstance was $300 million (€241 million) a doable amount.

You can say that again! The email estimates the budget will blow up to the “mid-300 millions” by the time production wraps, which would mean twice the budget of its predecessor “Skyfall” and an unprecedented cost for any studio to take on.

There’s no doubt that the film will make a lot of money, but even so, it’s still a very expensive risk to take with any production, no matter how huge its built-in fanbase is.

“There are expectations we must meet for the audience. Still, we must find further cuts. This is not about ‘nickel and diming’ the production,” Glickman wrote.

He also included suggestions on how to do that: they could use only 3 instead of 4 train carriages in one action scene, they could shoot a villa interior scene in London instead of Rome, they could move more scenes to Mexico because the country was offering deductions for shooting there, or they could ditch the rain in one scene in favor of CGI.

None of these was accepted, being deemed “necessary” for the feel of the movie.

Ironically, Sony Pictures co-chairwoman Amy Pascal saw this coming, writing in an earlier email that “it’s insane and you know with no script this movie is gonna go overbudget.” The film only started shooting last Monday, so it has several more months to go even more over-budget.

The Sony hack

Last month, hackers going by the group name Guardians Of Peace (#GOP) hacked into Sony, stealing important data from medical records, staff home addresses, and personal phone numbers to private conversations among Hollywood’s biggest hotshots.

So far, #GOP has released emails apparently confirming that Sony headquarters is nothing but a fancy high school yard because, instead of meeting face to face to discuss very important matters, all players seemed more content to spewing nasty and very offensive comments via email.

This past week, for instance, Pascal and longtime partner producer Scott Rudin were revealed to have engaged in a very bitter feud over the much-delayed “Jobs” biopic and Angelina Jolie, who wanted to steal director David Fincher from “Jobs” for her own “Cleopatra” movie, to have cracked racist jokes about Barack Obama, to have called Kevin Hart names, and to have had a serious giggle over the size of Michael Fassbender’s male organ, after he went full-frontal in “Shame.”

Both Pascal and Rudin apologized for the things they said when no one was watching, insisting they were just jokes that didn’t really mean anything.

As of now, the legitimacy of the emails on “Spectre” has not been confirmed.