Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Just reading the wiki about On Stranger Tides, the thing that seems to be unique about it was that it was shot with 3D camera in an outside environment? That is, not using bluescreen. Perhaps that made it so complex and expensive?

Which is the kind of outsized spectacle that only someone who's directed mostly musicals could fully capture on camera.

At World's End came out three years before Tangled - the latter was never at the top of the list.

Obviously all of these films made a lot of money, which is why there's another one after this, and another in the works.

I could have sworn Tangled was on top of the list at one point, I remember it because it was so surprising. Of course, all these numbers are make-believe and unverified anyway.

xpost You raise a good point. There have been a handful of musicals in the new 3D era, why has nobody made a giant spectacular 3D musical yet? Or did I just forget about it?

Oh! Calcutta! 3D: WANGS FLY @ U FACE

needs more gimbals

Moulin Rouge would totally have been 3D if the tech had been there at the time.

I only saw Madagascar 3 in 2D, I can imagine that one of the most amazing musical numbers in it would be head-popping in 3D

The catch: it's set to Fireworks.

LOL, as I was reading your post I was like 'okay, how did DreamWorks manage to taint the scene being described?'

My first guess was 'showstopping musical number takes a quick break so several characters can fart at one another'.

I was at WDW when they were animating Tangled and saw some test footage and was like 'wow, that's like some Veggie Tales-level bad animation, holy shit' and this clearly is not reflected in the final film which has long led me to believe they did a massive overhaul on the thing at some point and would explain the $$$.

That's how any 3d animation works - up until the last run of design/rendering, they can pretty much manipulate everything in real-time as far as placing characters, syncing dialogue, etc. and once everything's good they actually render it with the real textures, facial expressions, highly detailed 3d models, lighting, etc

Back in the Toy Story days I'm pretty sure the first cut that was presented was practically stick figures moving around a vague blur

Half of the reason Terminator 3 is so high on the list despite being less visually interesting than virtually every other entry in the franchise is Arnold's salary was 1/4 of the budget

Actor salaries on anything that's a sequel to a successful film bumps the total cost up a bunch, unless it's a labor of love or they decide to negotiate for a post-release payout

supposedly Johnny Depp made $55 million for this particular film so uh...