Cleopatra cost Twentieth Century Fox $44 million, by the studio’s own estimate. That may sound like the budget of one of those genre pictures that winds up going straight to streaming, but if we convert those 1963 dollars into current ones, it comes out to $480 million. The most expensive film ever made up to that point, it remained an industry symbol of near-parodically troubled production and grotesque cost inflation for decades. Like The Wizard of Oz, it failed to recoup its investment during its initial theatrical run, eventually turning a profit thanks only to re-releases and television rights sales. And yet, these six decades later, the investment seems to have proven sound, at least according to the video above from YouTube channel Wolfcrow, “Why Cleopatra Still Looks Like a Trillion Bucks.”
Unlike some infamously expensive movies, Cleopatra doesn’t leave you wondering where all the money went. Wolfcrow creator Sareesh Sudhakaran points out some of the myriad ways it manifests onscreen, from the 70-foot-long giant sphinx to the full-scale Alexandria harbor built on the coast to the Roman Forum set designed to be three times larger than the actual Roman Forum to the 65 or so outfits Elizabeth Taylor wears in the title role (to say nothing of the 26,000 other costumes made for all the other characters). Even the matte paintings and optical camera tricks still look convincing. The film’s production designers knew that nothing could be done by half measures, given that the 65mm Todd-AO stock used for filming would expose any flimsiness on the big screen.
Just as unforgiving was the ultra-wide aspect ratio used for the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, which necessitated painstaking labor on everything that went before the camera, but also a new approach to the composition of the shots themselves. Even those of us who’ve never seen the movie can call to mind images of its climactic chariot race, a sequence that earned its cultural impact the hard way.
It took five months to film on the largest set ever built at that time, with 1,500 extras in its stands. A few years later, Lawrence of Arabia took Hollywood grandeur up to the level of sublimity with its real desert landscapes. David Lean “was obsessed with scale and detail,” Sudhakaran explains. “He wanted the desert to be more than just a backdrop. He wanted it to be a character in the story,” which required meticulous planning of all the ways its natural light could possibly be used to dramatic effect.
Though Sudhakaran clearly has an interest in spectacles from the golden age of the Hollywood historical epics, he’s also made videos on lastingly impressive movies from other times and genres. When was the last time you sat down to enjoy the satirical urban techno-dystopia RoboCop, the comic-strip noir fantasia of Dick Tracy, or the flamboyant de-familiarized twenty-third century of The Fifth Element — or better yet, saw them properly screened at a revival house? When they came out, those films met with varying degrees of box-office success and critical praise, if not regarded as the absolute peak of cinematic sophistication. In our time, their ambition and craft look nothing short of astonishing, especially when we remember that they built their worlds in physical reality with real human beings, mostly analog techniques, and a whole lot of labor and imagination. Could even a trillion dollars buy the same results today?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.