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‘Ghost Rider 2’ Gets Budget Cut 60 Million

Nic CageMan, poor Nic Cage. Now he only has some chump change to the tune of $75 million to make Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance. Of course, he started out with $135 million but the studios thought was a ridiculous amount to give to the sequel (which, in truth, it is) and they cut the funds nearly in half. So now Nic is making the movie for late October Rom-com type money. For shame. Interestingly, $5 million of that $60 million (which is 8.3%, gee thanks 7th grade math!) came out of Nic’s paycheck. So his earnings went from $12 million to a paltry $7 million. Whatever shall he do?

While it is fun to make fun of Nic Cage, unfortunately this film is helmed by Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine, who are two of the funnest directors around (or at least according to Armond White, they’re the cultural Jesus who’ve been sent here to save us all from Pixar). When you watch one of their movies, at least you know you are in for a very wild ride for the next hour and a half. Hopefully this budget cut won’t significantly affect the story (it definitely will) but let’s be honest. We didn’t exactly have high hopes for this film from the start.

But let’s play with the numbers, shall we? The original Ghost Rider was budgeted for $110 million and eventually went on to make about $230 million worldwide prior to DVD sales, which for the sake of our argument, let’s put at a decent $30 million. That means a total of $150 million of profit. So now the next one is budgeted for $135 million, but that gets cut $60 million down to $75 million. If you take into account that a film’s advertising budget is roughly an additional 85% of the original budget, then you are looking at budgets for the first at $200 million and the second at $210 million. But with the budget reduction and the additional DVD profits added in (compounded on the fact that I did most of this math in my head and I majored in Communications), you remember this is Ghost Rider and it’s a sequel we’re talking about, so we should all take a moment to re-evaluate our lives and remember what’s truly valuable (for instance, my Ninja Turtle action figures).

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Source: Indie Wire

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