A mothballed 747-100 might be worth almost nothing, literally cents on the dollar, especially as anything valuable will usually have been removed by various parties before it even hits the boneyards. And during the current situation where air cargo, the only viable use for even airworthy old 747s, is not growing I can see some broker selling a plane in the low single digit millions. An airworthy 747 will of course be worth more but the article doesn’t mention that and it seems unlikely.
I guess Cinemablend isn't going to fact check this claim?<p>It's typically much cheaper to do anything like a plane crash in a computer (or models + computer). Even 20 years ago, when I was bidding visual effects, I bet it would have been cheaper. [Note, I haven't seen the movie, so maybe there are 50 angles of it exploding, in which case it might not be]<p>The cost of a mothballed plane is probably trivial compared to the daily cost of Tenet's movie set. You've got all of the actors (or maybe stunt people in this case) and crew members, so their salaries, food, hotels, costs of being on location and so on. The cost of renting the location itself. Constructing things you're going to destroy, cleaning up, etc.<p>My guess is that Nolan wanted to do it this way because it's more fun. Nolan knows it's cheaper to do it in CGI, but blowing stuff up in CGI is boring. He gets to sit in a desk chair and look at something blowing up on a screen instead of seeing it IRL. And he can call the shots because he's Nolan, he directed, wrote and produced the thing.
Reminds me of this: “India's mission to Mars cost less than the movie Gravity” <a href="https://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6838079/india-mars-mangalyaan" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6838079/india-mars-mangalyaan</a>
I don't doubt that a decomissioned/mothballed 747 would be cheap or worthless -- in the same way you can basically get an old upright piano for free just by offering to take it away from someone's home.<p>My question is actually a logistical one: how on earth do you <i>get</i> a presumably inoperational 747 to wherever it is that you need to shoot it exploding?<p>Or do they just fly a crew and equipment out to god-knows-where, set up ginormous green screens behind it and detonate it in whatever airplane graveyard it sits in?<p>Given the massive transportation costs either way, I'm inclined to believe this headline is false, but good publicity. ;)
The HN headline is click-bait.
The quote is 'more efficient' rather than cost effective and article goes on to say that it may been more expensive.<p>I'm guessing that 'more efficient' means you buy a 747 and film it being blown it up and move on to the rest of the film.
Where as CGI or miniatures take longer and add more risk if they don't look right on the first attempt.
It's funny that the article mentions <i>The Dark Knight</i> without mentioning that in that movie Nolan blows up a real building in the scene in which the hospital is destroyed.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nJTZzgBwnQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nJTZzgBwnQ</a>
This reminds me of how it was cheaper for the US to go to the moon than it would have been to fake the moon landing with the technology of the time. At least I remember reading an article a few years ago with that premise.
Original source: <a href="https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-christopher-nolan-747-plane-crash-interview/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-christopher-nolan-747-plane...</a><p>What he actually said was "efficient" not "cost effective".
I wonder what's the chance of failure on that kind of shoot. Redoing the CGI explosion to tweak it would be likely cheaper than 2 planes. Or is there a "plane failed to explode nicely" insurance?
Blog spam. Original blog post:
<a href="https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-christopher-nolan-747-plane-crash-interview/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamesradar.com/tenet-christopher-nolan-747-plane...</a>
I miss 80s-90s action flicks :/ cgi, even in 2020, looks like cgi.<p>Glad the article did a shout to Tom Cruise. The helicopter stunt scenes in the last MI were _absolutely phenomenal_.
To my surprise the airplane was pretty much unbroken from the outside.<p><a href="https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/9719776" rel="nofollow">https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/9719776</a>
I do sometimes wonder about the environmental impact of the entertainment industry. Destroying something for the sake of entertainment seems ... I don't know ... wasteful?<p>In this case, yes the plane was probably mothballed anyway, and yes actually blowing it up will give a more realistic result in a shorter time than CGI. But were the environmental impacts even considered when making the decision?
It seems like we have come full circle, in Escape from New York (1981) it was cheaper to build a miniture New York skyline and attach fluorescent tape to the edges rather than create a CG wireframe model for the "computers" in the main characters glider.[1][2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.amc.com/talk/2008/06/the-behind-the" rel="nofollow">https://www.amc.com/talk/2008/06/the-behind-the</a><p>[2] <a href="https://youtu.be/xxYmMRxnEic?t=68" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/xxYmMRxnEic?t=68</a>
I ran into this counterintuitive situation when trying to do better simulations of a fusion reactor I designed. High end physics simulation software that <i>might</i> do the job starts at $50k. Then there will still be tradeoffs on the accuracy of the simulation.<p>Because of the way it uses some older, off the shelf equipment for a key part of the device, I might actually be able to build a prototype for that price.
Congrats to Tenet for hitting break-even last week, despite tanking at the U.S. box office.<p><a href="https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/tenet-box-office-christopher-nolan-warner-bros-1234768187/" rel="nofollow">https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/tenet-box-office-ch...</a>
"Cheaper to do it for real" might only work out if you actually get the shot you need on the first try. There's probably directors out there who went for the same approach with less financial success.