I got an email from Will Reynolds at Obsessed With Film that almost made me shit my pants. Here’s what Will said:
Thought I’d send this along to you – Matthew Vaughn has written in The Guardian (the newspaper that got Paddy Considine killed!) that his script for the Thor movie initially came in with a budget of £300 million!
At the current exchange rate, that would be a 600 MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE. That’s a hundred times more expensive than Steve Austin. It takes the supposed budget of Spider-Man 3 (300 million plus) and buttfucks it right into cheapness.
Thankfully for Vaughn and Marvel, Will got his pound and dollar signs mixed up. But even still…. THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS?!?! Wowzers. I’m reading Mark Protosevich’s April draft of the script (Vaughn says he and the writer just finished up a new draft a week or so ago), and it’s flat out epic fantasy, with the only trips to Midgard (ie, Earth) involving Vikings. It’s a big, big movie.
Whatever happens in the new draft (has Vaughn inserted any Dr. Don Blake stuff? The April draft is free of standard superheroics, which is pretty cool), Marvel’s number crunchers tell Vaughn that it will cost 300 million dollars to make, and that they’d like him to cut it down to 150 million. That’s still a pricey movie about Norse gods. But I do think that a big, fantastical and sweeping Thor movie would be just the kind of thing to separate this project from every other superhero movie being churned out these days.
Check out Vaughn’s bloggy little editorial about getting food poisoning at Sitges right here.