The current cinema landscape is full of blockbuster movies that cost well over $100 million to produce, and Dolph Lundgren recently teased Expendables 4's budget, which could be close to $200 million. Yet some economical filmmakers have demonstrated that the same outcome can be achieved with a much lower budget.
Tons of movies have low budgets that audiences would never have expected, and the following examples took Redditors by surprise the most. Including a star-studded action movie and a sci-fi film with award-winning special effects, these movies prove that small budgets can be just as eye-popping as big budgets.
Ex Machina (2015)
Ex Machina is about a CEO of an advanced technology company (Oscar Isaac) who builds humanoid robots, and the digital effects of the movie are incredibly realistic. Supes1 notes that "Ex Machina won awards for its special effects on a budget of only $15 million." The movie was nominated for and won loads of awards, including best visual effects at the Academy Awards. The 2015 release also stars one of the best actors working today, Oscar Isaac.
Even though the effects of the movie look incredible and it has some major star power behind it, Ex Machina is still a fairly small film in of locations and characters. There are really only three characters in the whole film movie, and it is set in one house, albeit a huge villain's lair in the jungle-type house. So the $15 million budget isn't that hard to believe.
The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006)
The first Santa Clause is the perfect Christmas movie, as Tim Allen gives one of the best and most entertaining portrayals of the character and it has such an original spin on the Christmas movie genre. Unfortunately, it's a case of diminishing returns, as the sequels got worse with each consecutive release. But strangely, as BTTF41 notes, "The Santa Clause 3 apparently had a budget of $12 million, which I still don’t believe."
The threequel's budget is almost unheard of, as it's just a faction of The Santa Clause 2's budget of $65 million and even less than the first movie, which was made with $22 million. But it was smart of Disney to tighten the purse strings, as though the narrative doesn't make a whole lot of sense, the effects and set designs of the movie look great, and an inflated budget was clearly unnecessary.
Moon (2009)
2001: A Space Odyssey-influenced sci-fi movie on a shoestring budget is no easy feat, but that's exactly what first-time director Duncan Jones achieved. There's no filmmaker more economical than Jones, as the 2009 micro-budget movie could almost be called epic.
Just like, there are very few characters in the film, and outside of the HAL9000-inspired robot, GERTY, there's really only one character, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who is on a mining mission on the far side of the moon. But despite Rockwell carrying the film by himself, it's clear where the bulk of the movie's budget went. The incredible production design looks better and more believable than in some blockbuster sci-fi movies.
Lost In Translation (2003)
Lost in Translation only cost $4 mil." It was thanks to Murray agreeing to play Bob at a hugely discounted fee that kept the budget so low.
But according to Filmmaker, Sofia Coppola sent him $1 million, a quarter of the budget, without even getting him to sign anything. And it was a massive sigh of relief when he randomly showed up on set in Japan to shoot his scenes. Actors have taken pay cuts for movie roles on several occasions, and those roles ironically usually end up being some of their best performances, and that's no different with Bill Murray and Lost in Translation.
Baby Driver (2017)
The Edgar Wright-directed action movies for fans of car chases, but along with its epic action sequence, it has a huge cast too. The movie stars Ansel Elgort, Jamie Foxx, and Jon Hamm to name a few, and it looks like the movie could have easily cost $100 million. Daftbanna reminds uses that somehow "Baby Driver had a budget of $34 million. Edgar Wright is mostly good at making a cheap movie look expensive."
Wright is one of the most consistently economical directors working today, as outside of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, he has mostly made movies under $40 million, and Baby Driver is the best example. The low budget is what led to an incredible net profit at the box office that studios rarely see too, as Baby Driver made an astounding $226 million worldwide.
Saw (2004)
Saw's name in the ring for looking like it had a much higher budget than it did. Saw was a box office phenomenon, as it made over $100 million worldwide after having been made with just one million dollars. It isn't all that hard to believe, as most of the movie takes place in one room and there aren't any notable actors in it either.
Saw had such a low budget that the movie's writer, Leigh Whannell, even took one of the main roles, as he plays Adam Stanheight. But even though later films in the series would have much higher budgets and production values, The first film is still the best Saw movie.
The Green Knight (2021)
A Deleted points to The Green Knight as a movie that stretches its budget farther than possible. The Redditor claims that "The Green Knight cost $15 million and looks like it cost double that amount." For an epic medieval fantasy movie, $15 million is microscopic compared to other films of its nature.
However, the film still looks just as expensive as its peers. And given that the $100 million The Last Duel was released the same year, it's hard to understand why the Ridley Scott-directed movie was more expensive outside of its A-list cast.
Undead (2003)
Not many people have heard of Undead, an Australian horror-comedy, and that's because the marketing budget was probably as low as the production budget, which was around $750,000. Shadownight311 even explains that "the special effects were done on a laptop, but they look great and blow some big-budget movies' effects away."
Despite having a production cost of sub $1 million, the film is shot phenomenally well and the blood splatter and other gory effects are both realistic and hilariously entertaining. But ironically, the directors of the movie, The Spierig Brothers, went on to direct Jigsaw, the eighth film in the Saw franchise.
Upstream Color (2013)
Even before Upstream Color, director Shane Carruth made the cult hit Primer with just $7000, and that's nothing more than a month's rent in some places in the US. Carruth works so well with micro budgets that what he could do with a blockbuster budget would be unimaginable.
Friday The 13th (1980)
According to Friday the 13th had a budget of $550,000. For a movie released in 1980, it definitely looks like it could have cost a few times more." The same could be said for hundreds of other horror movies, and if any filmmaker knows how to stretch a tiny budget, it's a horror director.
In many cases, horror directors are the most inventive with budgets, and they make what looks like should cost thousands of dollars with cheap make-up kits and creative editing. Whether it's Get Out, they all look like they cost so much more to produce and made hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide, and it all started with Friday the 13th.
