What Made Tangled the Costliest Animated Film

Disney’s Tangled was released almost a decade ago, but intriguingly, it remains the most expensive animated movie of all time. If the reports are to be believed, the movie cost a whopping $260 million, which beats the remake of The Lion King by over $10 million. It is surprising that after all these years, no animated movie has been able to beat it. So, we decided to look at the factors that made Tangled such an expensive film and why has no other animated movie yet has broken its record. The most obvious reasons for such high spending are the rewrites. The film took several rewrites, and it has been in works as early as 1996. The movie was first pitched to Disney President Michael Eisner in 2001 by Keane. The studio got on board for the project in 2002, and initially, it was supposed to be made under the title Rapunzel Unbraided. However, its development took much longer than expected, and Keane was able to rework the script all over again with a much more sincere and genuine tone over the course of three years. Another important and cumbersome aspect was, surprisingly, the animation of Rapunzel’s hair. It took a lot of effort and time to get it right. If the creators are to be believed, the hairs are the hardest part of animate in a computer since they are made up of pixels that bounce against one another. Using mathematics to solve artistic problems was no easy task, and the team took six years to pull it off. The hair is, without a doubt, the most underappreciated part of the film. The film’s work was surprisingly rebooted again in 2006, with a completely clean slate under John Lasseter and Ed Catmull. Only the tower, the hair, and Rapunzel were used from the previous drafts, and work was started all over again. The revamp was aimed at giving the movie a comedic direction and a contemporary feel. Along with the co-director, Keane resigned from his positions because of a lack of experience in animation and health issues. Byron Howard, who had just finished his work on Bolt, took the responsibility, and the production of the film finally went smoothly from then on. Tangled became a commercial success; however, it failed to recover the production costs from the box-office earnings alone. It ended up with a total earning of over $592 million, which wasn’t that much considering its budget and the effort that went into it. If the marketing costs were also taken into account, the movie should have earned double of its budget at the box office, but unfortunately, it failed to do so. However, Tangled should still be appreciated not just for the time and effort that went into it but also for the cutting-edge CGI used to create such an engrossing movie. The box-office records set up by the movie did not last long, and Frozen, just three years later, broke all of them. Since Frozen II just broke several box-office records just last year, it is safe to say that Tangled’s box office success is not the right perspective to see it through to understand its influence. It is only because of movies like Tangled that ushered a wave of Disney Princess films, so all the Princess movies that will be released in coming years should thank Tangled for setting the platform for them. SourceWhat Made Tangled the Costliest Animated Film