Do high budgets for films and television series lead to high-quality productions? Or does spending too much money actually make the end product worse?

In this week’s podcast, we discuss big budgets. We use Amazon’s Rings of Power series to question whether a large budget is a necessary condition for success in film and television. We discuss the economic theory of resource scarcity, hubristic planning, white elephants, the Mythical Man-Month, and the Swedish warship Vasa. We widen the lens of the conversation to ask how large budgets affect decision-making and even draw an analogy between large film budgets and military spending. Finally, we share some of our favourite high and low-budget films.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

- Big-budget films are getting worse — and we can prove it
- Why movies cost so much to make
- Movies Decoded: The complex relationship between budgets, box office and ratings
- The Mythical Man-Month

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