I'm chiming in too late but one thing that /has/ to be pointed out is that inflation is a thing. I saw earlier Nolan was pointed out as an example of a filmmaker that has reasonable budgets but Batman Begins cost $150 million in 2005. Wanna know what that'd be nowadays with inflation? $234 million. 34 million more than The Batman. Wanna know the budget for The Dark Knight? It'd be $255 million nowadays with inflation. The Dark Knight Rises? $332 million.
It is true that chaotic pre-planning and stuff like that can affect a film's budget, buuut I do think that this discussion can and often does become very misleading and the proposed solutions by some people are just flat-out misguided.
Pixar got a lot of flack recently for Elemental's 200 million dollar budget but Pixar's president recently did an interview explaining the budget and it made sense.
Pixar's 'Elemental' Box Office: What's Behind the Rebound in Sales - Variety
Is there a way to make these kinds of movies at a lower price point?
That’s a constant question. One of the ways you make these films for less money, and almost all of our competitors do this, is to do work offshore. It’s only us and Disney Animation that makes animation films in the U.S. anymore with all of the artists under one roof. We feel like having a colony of artists approach has differentiated our films. We hope to find a path to make that work. “Elemental” was particularly expensive because all the characters have visual effects. We had been getting the film costs down.
The other thing I’ll say about our film budgets is that our whole company exists only to make these films. So when we say a budget, that is everything it takes to run the whole company. Sometimes, the budgets [for other films] that get reported are physical production costs and don’t include the salaries of executives and things like that. Our budgets include all of that, so there’s some accounting context that gets lost. But that doesn’t mean they’re not expensive.
Obviously some of that mostly applies only to Pixar, but I do think it does goes to show there are a lot of things that go into a budget that most people don't take into account. That's why I roll my eyes at statements like "A Superman movie should not cost any more than 150 million" when adjusted for inflation even the first Superman movie cost 257 million dollars.
For some types of films, mainly superhero films, any budget under 150 million, even 200 million in some cases, is just flat out either impossible or ridiculous unless they exploited the workers even more than they already do. And what I've found ironic over these pasts few months is seeing so many of the same people championing for workers to be paid more also in the very same breath say "Reduce film and TV budgets!"
When they cut corners in the budget, who the hell do you think are gonna be the first corners they are gonna cut? Lower budgets benefit investors, they do not actually benefit the crew in any way and it's flat out delusional to think so.
I will also note that companies do want their movies to actually make money, so I do not get why people are just assuming they aren't already making these films for as cheap as they can make them, especially because in some cases like Ant-Man Quantumania it's flat-out obvious they half-assed a lot.
The problem with the ****ty looking films is not the budgets, the budgets would always have to be that way for these big blockbusters, maybe even bigger. The problem is that resources are not properly being used into creating films that look good.
