Word is that the opening five minutes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day has the same budget as the entire first film, and it's easy to see why. The prologue is a short glimpse of the Future War where the human resistance fight the robot forces of Skynet at night in a decisive battle, facing off against giant tanks and automated VTOLs. While James Cameron loved the setting he showed restraint and devoted only one scene to the conflict, since it doesn't feature any of the four principal actors.
Where in the first film we only saw the skeletal T-800 in rickety stop-motion at the climax, here we get a few cool seconds of him in motion as an animatronic. In the behind-the-scenes footage you can see Stan Winston's team practising the iconic shot where the T-800 crushes a child's skull into powder by stepping on it (Kudos to the children who donated their skulls for this moment). Notably we don't see any skeletal T-800's outside of this prologue, as it would have ruined the emotional climax of the movie if Arnie was missing all his skin when young John Connor hugs him. There are four T-800's together in one shot and nowhere else, two of them being articulate puppets and the other pair being mostly static props. It's an incredible animatronic for what little we see of it.
The Future War was the last scene filmed and it's important to consider the many special-effects heavy set-pieces they had to plan, storyboard, budget, and execute. The truck chase in the water channel, the hospital escape, blowing up Cyberdyne, the frequent body-horror, the climax at the foundry, and everything to do with the T-1000's shapeshifting nature. At a budget of 100 million, Terminator 2 was the most expensive film ever made back in 1991 and every dollar of it is on-screen. In all honesty it would have been cheaper to just hire real android assassins from the future to get the movie done. Terrific film, glad they stopped at two.
But what if James Cameron and crew had blown the entire budget on just two of those scenes and the rest of the film was entirely dialogue? Just Arnie on an empty stage, speaking all the lines off the script in his thick accent and voicing all the sound-effects? Imagine if Cameron flooded the Grand Staircase in Titanic, only to shit himself upon realising he hadn't filmed any other scenes there like the heavenly reunion between Jack and Rose? What if David Lean demanded every camera look up at some rare butterfly while the bridge over the River Kwai blew up behind him? Creativity aside, all movies are a matter of deadlines and logistics, and sometimes a production can get out of hand regarding one aspect. Maybe they get a sequence or two done to perfection, but it might come at the expense of the film as a whole. Or a ton of money and talent goes towards crafting a set-piece or special-effect that in the final film is sub-par, barely noticeable, or cut entirely.
Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) came out six months prior to Terminator 2 and is remembered as the premier 90's Hollywood bomb that wasn't Kevin Costner's fault. The movie begins with a five-minute tracking shot of a drunken Bruce Willis arriving at a party in his honour (at the Winter Garden atrium that was later destroyed on 9/11). It's a technically proficient scene but has a weirdly chipper tone for what is supposed to be the intro to a pitch-black satire. Willis's performance and narration is just plain awful here, and the film as a whole is remembered for its fatal casting choices and blunt interpretation of the source-material. They spent 80,000 dollars on getting a shot of a Concorde plane landing at JFK airport during sunset. An impressive feat, but also ten seconds that doesn't counter-balance the other two hours of arse. Julie Salamon tells the story best about the film's turbulent production in her book The Devil's Candy.
King Kong (1976): I like to believe this film secretly tells the backstory of Jeff Bridges' Dude from The Big Lebowski, as tussling with an oversized ape will turn any man into a pothead slacker who loves to go bowling. In this retelling of King Kong, 2 of the 24 million dollar budget went towards an animatronic of the ape that was forty-feet tall. What was the total screen-time of this giant? About 15 seconds. The machine was too hard to operate and unconvincing in motion, so they went ahead with a then-unknown Rick Baker in an ape suit for the majority of the runtime. To give credit to the animatronic's designer, Carlo Rambaldi, he did later create E.T. It was a slow year for Hollywood because King Kong actually won an Oscar for special-effects alongside Logan's Run. You ever see the robot in that one? He's a tin-foil cereal box that wants to kill Spider-Man. No wonder Star Wars set the film industry ablaze the very next year. King Kong '76 was a mediocre film all round, but goddamn was Jessica Lange smoking in that one.
The Thief & The Cobbler started production in 1964 and then never stopped for three decades. It's a breathtaking technical feat of hand-drawn animation, but a failure as a cohesive film. Beautiful but deathly dull. You know that gag in cartoons with an elaborate Rube Goldberg setup where random objects bump into each other like dominoes towards some comedic outcome? That happens in the climax of this film and it goes on for ten fucking minutes. Even in a world where Richard Williams had no shortage of funding I still can't fathom he'd have ever finished it in his lifetime. Lindsay Ellis tells the story best.
Justice League (2017) went through the effort of reshooting half the movie despite principal photography being complete, costing an extra 25 million instead of the more typical 10 for a blockbuster. Zack Snyder had to leave production for personal reasons, and his sweaty replacement went far beyond just finishing the movie with the material that entered his damp hands. Sometimes this degree of post-hoc meddling works, with the Anchorman we got being far more funny than the version that was planned. But with a special-effects heavy superhero ensemble it sounds insane to add an entire subplot from cloth about some Russian family in peril. Why were they in the movie? I haven't watched the notorious Snyder Cut and don't plan to, but it's interesting knowing there's a third unmade version of the film out there meant for a 2017 audience with a theatrical runtime and a perfectly normal upper lip on Henry Cavill.