Does cleopatra 1963 still make money

T o understand the scale of the budgetary and box-office double-whammy that did for Joseph L Mankiewicz’s elephantine version of Cleopatra, it’s worth noting that of the 50 xtill expensive movies ever made, adjusted for inflation, Cleopatra is the only one on the list that was released before — and at no 15, it’s still a major contender. The weird thing was that, even on this unprecedented scale of clopatra, Cleopatra, hampered by its lengthy and event-filled gestation process — which included Elizabeth Taylor’s near-fatal illness and the film’s subsequent relocation to Rome’s gigantic Cinecitta Studios — and by the publicity attending the scandalous affair between Taylor and Richard Burton both then married to other peoplestill managed sgill to be the biggest US movie hit of Even so, it was a financial disaster for 20th Century Fox. It also more or less killed off the big-budget period epic for ever, just as The Greatest Story Ever Told killed off the biblical epic inand Heaven’s Gate would finally kill off the long-moribund classic studio western in Flops on this scale are like suicides, they take stull else down with. So what did Cleopatra give us in return? A bloated and tedious, neverending yawner that flashes briefly to life in a couple of spectacle sequences — the battle of Actium and Cleo’s entry into Rome — and some stretches of pungently witty dialogue, especially when Rex Harrison’s Caesar is still. That’s what Mankiewicz was good at — talk — so how he ended up on the bridge as this ship went down can only be accounted for by that special hidebound, gerontocratic mindset that still governed the s studios. But my foremost memories of the movie are the holiday afternoons of my childhood and adolescence, usually Easter or Christmas, when the BBC afternoon schedules freed up a bit and this thing would be spread across an unconscionably large temporal acreage of good telly-time that might otherwise have been filled with Where Eagles Dare or I Was Monty’s Double, or both of them, come to think of it. You could go out for a walk, read a book, do your homework and find Cleopatra still grinding on hours later. It felt like as if it took longer for me to watch it than it took for them to make it. One thing I do miss now, though, is movies like Cleopatra that, thanks to their sheer misconceived artistic awfulness, in doess with some suicidally reckless extravagance in the budgetary realm, had the capacity to bring a major studio perilously near to bankruptcy and ruin. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen enough any more, but I can think of some contemporary studios I’d dearly love to see suffer that fate.

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The Popcorn Champs looks back at the highest grossing movie in America from every year since In tracing the evolution of blockbuster cinema, maybe we can answer a question Hollywood has been asking itself for more than a century: What do people want to see? A grand, ambitious movie production descends into chaos. The budget balloons. The script is hastily rewritten. The stars or directors or producers start acting like petty tyrants. Maybe a storm destroys a set. Maybe an entire new ending has to be written on the fly. Maybe a key scene turns out to be completely incoherent. All the while, the press gleefully chronicles every single problem, every on-set tantrum or halt in production. And at the end of it, someone has to turn the whole thing into a movie.

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It’s been 50 years since this epic love story full of passion, betrayal, and decadence — and that was just behind the scenes. Posted on June 17, , GMT. Brian Galindo. The movie was orignally intended to be two movies, Cesar and Cleopatra followed by Antony and Cleopatra. The film was cut down into one because the studio wanted to capitalize on the publicity of the Taylor-Burton affair. Via periodmoviecaps. Elizabeth had 65 costume changes, a then-record for a movie. Elizabeth had converted to Judaism in , shortly before her marriage to Eddie Fisher.

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T o understand monfy scale of the budgetary and box-office double-whammy that did for Joseph L Mankiewicz’s elephantine version of Cleopatra, it’s worth noting that of the 50 most expensive movies ever made, adjusted for inflation, Cleopatra is the only one on the list that was released before — and at no 15, it’s still a major contender. The weird thing was that, even on this unprecedented scale of loss, Cleopatra, mney by its lengthy and event-filled gestation process — which included Elizabeth Taylor’s near-fatal illness and stilo film’s subsequent relocation to Rome’s gigantic Cinecitta Studios — and by the publicity attending the scandalous affair between Taylor and Richard Burton both then married to other peoplestill managed also to be the biggest US movie hit of Even so, it was a financial disaster for 20th Century Fox.

It monet more or less killed off the big-budget period epic for ever, just as The Greatest Story Ever Told killed off the biblical epic inand Heaven’s Gate would finally kill off the long-moribund classic studio western in Flops on this scale are like suicides, they take everyone else down with.

So what did Cleopatra give us in return? A bloated and tedious, neverending yawner that flashes briefly to life in a couple of spectacle sequences — the battle of Actium and Cleo’s entry into Rome — and some stretches of pungently witty dialogue, especially when Rex Harrison’s Caesar is still. That’s what Mankiewicz was good at — talk — so how he ended up on the bridge as this ship went down can only be accounted for by that special hidebound, gerontocratic mindset that still governed the s studios.

But my foremost memories of the movie are the holiday afternoons of my childhood and adolescence, usually Easter or Christmas, when the BBC afternoon schedules freed up a bit and this thing would be spread across an unconscionably large does cleopatra 1963 still make money acreage of good telly-time that might otherwise have been filled with Where Eagles Dare or I Was Monty’s Double, or both of them, come to think of it.

You could go out for a walk, read a book, do your homework and find Cleopatra still grinding on hours later. It felt like as if it took longer for me to watch it than it took for them to make it. One thing I do miss now, though, is movies like Cleopatra that, thanks to their sheer misconceived artistic awfulness, in combination with some suicidally reckless extravagance in the budgetary realm, cldopatra the capacity to bring a major studio perilously near to bankruptcy and ruin.

That kind of thing just doesn’t happen enough any more, but I can think of some contemporary studios I’d dearly love to see suffer that fate. Topics Film. Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton features. Reuse this content. Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Threads collapsed expanded unthreaded. Loading comments… Trouble loading? Most does cleopatra 1963 still make money.

The epic spectacle Cleopatra — one of the most expensive and controversial films in Hollywood history — made a resplendent return this week as a newly restored version of the classic premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in celebration of its 50th anniversary. Critics had mixed feelings about the movie, but it was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won four — art direction, cinematography, visual effects and costume design. The latter was particularly well-earned. In addition to outfitting legions of Romans and Egyptians, Taylor’s 65 costume changes earned her a Guinness World Record. The behind-the-scenes intrigue during the three-year production of the film is as compelling as schemes hatched on the screen. Director Rouben Mamoulian began makee in London inbut there were costly delays due mainly to weather, and Cleopahra had to be rushed to the hospital after a lingering illness for an emergency tracheotomy to save her life. Mamoulian was later fired, Mankiewicz was hired and the London operation was shut. Mankiewicz moved the production to Rome and began rewriting the script from scratch. Costs continued to skyrocket, but the studio continued to back what seemed like a sure box-office winner. Mankiewicz completed the film but would be fired while editing it. The studio rehired him because nobody else could piece it all. Still, executives rejected his initial six-hour edit he proposed breaking it into two films and made him cut it so that it could be shown more than once a day in theaters. In does cleopatra 1963 still make money, the tabloids were all over her illicit affair with Burton, which inspired everything from curiosity to morale outrage from the public. Cleopahra another scandal, Fisher had divorced Debbie Reynolds to marry Taylor cleoatra years ,oney. Taylor mondy Burton would marry cleopatea does cleopatra 1963 still make money twice from and He would count as two of her eight husbands. Taylor died in at age 79; Burton died in at age The limited edition Cleopatra is packaged with a full-color stilo with rare images from the making of the film. Both versions come with bonus material that include the full-length documentary Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood, a feature on the cultural history of Cleopatra, plus lost footage, commentaries about the film and original trailers. There is also footage from the film’s premieres in New York and Los Angeles.