Best and Worst Use of Reshoot Money?

[chasmmi]

This obviously going to involve a lot of speculation and guessing, but from a purely Box Office perspective, what do you think were the best and worst financial investments into reshoots for big films?

 

Off the top of my head I am thinking:

 

Best - WWZ: Even though it can't have been cheap to refilm half of the film, the state of this with the original story appeared destined for super-bomb territory. The reshoots thus potentially turned an epic failure into something that not only made profit, but made sequel potential profit. That sounds like money well spent. 

 

(Reshooting the Rogue One ending may also have been a good investment too as the last 30 minutes was the part that got the big praise in reviews and so if the original end had been less impressive, we could be talking a 400M movie instead of a 550M movie.)

 

 

Worst - Fan4stic (new one) : We will never probably know if the Tranq film was ever going to be any good. What we do know is that the audience outright rejected the film released in cinemas and that the worst parts were clearly the new scenes (like the ending).

 

Best case scenario, the original version would have done just as well (badly) as the released version. Worst case, we missed out on some interesting superhero film that could have hit cult status and done good TV and HE sales. Either way, it was throwing money down the drain. 

[chasmmi]

I went for recent films, because I don't know as much about the reshoot investments / stories of say a BTTF or Jaws for example.

[Plain Old Tele]

Honestly, so much of this is gonna be subjective, and really the only examples we have are the additional shoots that're well-publicized.

[Barnack]

Like said above it is extremely hard to evaluate, it will be a of a really generic movie that had massive re-shoot did very well, without knowing much what the movie would have looked like and made without them.

 

Lords of the rings 2/3 for example could be candidate, the massive performance of the third and the massive home video success are linked to the sustained quality, how much of that success is due to those massive reshoot Viggo Mortensen talked about in that interview:

http://www.blastr.com/2014-5-15/why-viggo-mortensen-says-lord-rings-trilogy-was-mess

 

They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video.”

According to him, the reshoots were a difference from strait to video quality to 2 of the most acclaimed and successful movie of all time, depending of how much it is not an exaggeration The 2 towers and Return of the kings must be up there as the best reshoot money spent candidate.

 

And other one would be Malick Days of Heaven, apparently according to Richard Gere the movie was entirely reshoot with a different "script", the movie is still selling today and often in top 400 movie of all time type of list.

Edited April 5, 2017 by Barnack

[The Panda]

It's impossible to know if reshoots made a movie better or worse, no matter how a movie turned out.

 

For all we know, Fan4stic could have been even worse without the reshoots.

[Jonwo]

Superman II was mostly a reshoot with Richard Lester when they kicked Richard Donner off the film, don't know if it makes the film better or worse though