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What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in 79

Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

2001 Budget: $10.5 million
TMP Budget: $46 million
Star Wars Budget: $11 million
The Black Hole Budget: $20 million

If TMP had been a non Trek SF movie from Paramount, intended to compete and cash in on the success of Star Wars, I suspect it could still have gotten a $10 or $20 million budget. TMP had such an overblown budget that the final result does not reflect the $46 million poured into it.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

Shawnster said:
2001 Budget: $10.5 million
TMP Budget: $46 million
Star Wars Budget: $11 million
The Black Hole Budget: $20 million

If TMP had been a non Trek SF movie from Paramount, intended to compete and cash in on the success of Star Wars, I suspect it could still have gotten a $10 or $20 million budget.
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I can't imagine that script getting greenlit for any budget at that time if there wasn't an existing cachet that mandated the picture get made.

PLANET OF THE TITANS, yeah, that is generic space adventure enough, but TMP is pretty ... well, not typical in a lot of regards.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

Shawnster said:
2001 Budget: $10.5 million
TMP Budget: $46 million
Star Wars Budget: $11 million
The Black Hole Budget: $20 million

If TMP had been a non Trek SF movie from Paramount, intended to compete and cash in on the success of Star Wars, I suspect it could still have gotten a $10 or $20 million budget. TMP had such an overblown budget that the final result does not reflect the $46 million poured into it.
Click to expand...

Except that $46 million figure is inaccurate, because Paramount lumped in all the development costs for previous, abortive projects like Planet of the Titans and Phase II.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

What frequently gets left out of these conversations is one key element of WHY Paramount went ahead with TMP despite it having a script that wouldn't have been greenlit in other circumstances (beyond that Star Trek was popular, so easily marketed):

Paramount had sunk all this money into Phase 2 for their 4th network, which was failing to come together. They'd paid for building sets, tying up soundstages. writing scripts, having miniatures built, honoring pay-or-play contracts,. etc., and from a business standpoint they needed to do something to recoup those expenses, so Eisner decreed of "In Thy Image" (reputedly, and I paraphrase) "we've been looking for a Star Trek movie script for years, and this is it." Sure it was...it was just good enough for them to scramble to make a movie and try to cash in on star Wars AND recoup their losses.
 
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Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

Christopher said:
Shawnster said:
2001 Budget: $10.5 million
TMP Budget: $46 million
Star Wars Budget: $11 million
The Black Hole Budget: $20 million

If TMP had been a non Trek SF movie from Paramount, intended to compete and cash in on the success of Star Wars, I suspect it could still have gotten a $10 or $20 million budget. TMP had such an overblown budget that the final result does not reflect the $46 million poured into it.
Click to expand...

Except that $46 million figure is inaccurate, because Paramount lumped in all the development costs for previous, abortive projects like Planet of the Titans and Phase II.
Click to expand...

That was my point. TMP budget is way out of proportion to other moves from around the same time.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

^What I'm saying is that you're using an incorrect figure for TMP's budget. The $46 million is actually the combined budget for TMP and several earlier, abortive projects all added together. A number of reference sources list the budget for TMP itself as $35 million instead. Which, granted, is still larger than the others, but not as exaggerated as the figure you used.

And the film would've cost even less if it hadn't been for the unsatisfactory FX from Abel & Associates and the need to start over with new miniatures and opticals from a new team. It's not like the film was intended to be that expensive from the get-go.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

If it had come in at its original budget of 15mil, Paramount still would have tacked on the p2 and TITANS overages to avoid paying out any gross point deals, so it still would have been advertised as 25 or 27 mil.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

In Paramount's defense, of course they included the costs of previous efforts in the TMP budget. That was all development work towards Star Trek. You think Apple doesn't include R&D costs for scrapped prototypes into the budget of the next iPad? That's the way it works for tax and liability reasons.

I dunno if I'd go so far as say "need to start over" with the RA&A effects since that is not a view universally held by some who worked on the movie, even if it's the line Trumbull gave and there were places where RA&A were failing.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

I don't think the 15mil budget Wise presumably signed off on when the feature was announced included p2 and other costs, because that would mean they thought the movie could be brought in for under 10 mil, and that thought had gone south even before TITANS.

It's even possible that the earlier costs were being written off for a different division at Paramount originally, and only got loaded onto TMP during the runaway escalation. Don't know who we'd ask about it though.

There are a lot of opinions about whether Abel could have pulled off some or all of the show, and even Probert seems to be ambivalent on the issue. It could be that the original 'save' idea - Trumbull doing the model stuff and letting Abel do the animation -- would have worked, but politically it was probably hard to manage and vfx management wasn't exactly Paramount's strong suite on TREK. If you realize how much of STAR WARS's VFX were accomplished just between Sept 76 and April 77, and how unbelievably little was finished (besides infrastructure, which is an enormous aspect in and of itself) between summer 75 and fall 76, it shows that a strong finish WAS possible, if not likely.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

Oh yeah, my point about the budget is that when you do the books you figure out how to do the biggest write-off possible . Everyone does this on their own taxes.

And exactly so about RA&A, people from there (like Taylor) say part of the reason the costs kept going up and the schedule kept slipping was because the script and VFX requirements kept changing, and then others say the Abel's shop's computerized camera system wasn't practical. Was it necessary for Trumbull to rethink everything about how the V'ger interiors where going to be done (the undulating, color changing surfaces, etc.)? Maybe so. Maybe not.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

Yeah, I guess we can speculate forever on how cool it might have looked, especially when you see the Abel concept art. But I do love the Trumbull cloud and have gotten to be okay with the vger exterior, mainly because of the great perspective Mead built into the design, which was carried through with some success on the Apogee miniature.

This makes me think of ENEMY MINE a little. The original director started shooting somewhere near where they shot PROMETHEUS I believe, and it was a really harsh alien look, but they got way behind schedule because it was too hard to work on the location and Fox canned the guy, with the new director changing the look of nearly everything and doing it in what I guess would be more of an 80s fantasy style, which is watchable but for me delivers very little of the visual potential they started out with.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

I really like Mead's V'ger design even if I'm not hot on all the details of how it was realized by Apogee. I just hate the way the DE "squashed" it front to back compared to Mead's profile elevations.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

I didn't know what was wrong with it on the DE reveal, except that it just seemed SMALL. And without the stylistic grandeur.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

trevanian said:
I didn't know what was wrong with it on the DE reveal, except that it just seemed SMALL. And without the stylistic grandeur.
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That's because it shrank from 82 to 2AU's in diameter.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

^^^Cloud, not V'ger.

It looked small in part because they revealed it the most boring, pedestrian way possible: a side view. Ugh.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

Where did you find that Welles quote? It may not be as flashy as the thing about a movie studio being a grownup's version of a toy train, but it is pithy as all hell.
 
Re: What if TMP had been a non Trek SF movie titled 'Vger' released in

I read it in a bio of Welles probably in 1998, but couldn't remember the exact quote, so I Googled it. I didn't find where he wrote or originally said it. I believe he also said something like "I never respected anyone who didn't work with restricted tools" or words to that effect.
 
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