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Sahara budget revealed

The LA Times has managed to obtain details of the budget for the movie Sahara. If you don't remember, Sahara was an action-adventure movie that came out in 2005, starring Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz. It lost $105 million at the box office and is regarded as one of the biggest flops in Hollywood's history.

The production costs came to $160 million but the producers managed to save a lot of money by shooting abroad. Some of their Moroccan crew were paid the same amount for a week's work as their US counterparts would be paid for a day. They were also given tax breaks and financial incentives by foreign governments.

But some of the other costs were shocking. They spent $105,556 on bottled water in Morocco alone. How many bottles does it take to spend that amount of money? I did a Google product search and found a site offering 24 bottles for $7.13, equaling about $0.30 per bottle. So, at that price you would need at least 355,307 bottles of water! The actual amount would probably be much higher because they would most likely buy wholesale in bulk, which would cost even less per bottle. Remember that this is only in Morocco and doesn't include any water costs in any of the other locations. Crazy.

Even this was a small cost compared to some of the other things in the budget. The strangest thing is that the "usual suspects" - special effects, post production, actors' wages - were the smallest items on the balance sheet. The main problem was that they would shoot complex sequences costing millions of dollars that ended up being cut from the final movie. The film also suffered because the high production costs meant that creative control became a secondary consideration in scenes with product placement.

A very interesting read. I'd recommend checking it out sooner rather than later, as Paramount are very angry that the budget was leaked and it may end up being taken down.