Shazam! Director Talks About The Benefits of Having a Smaller Budget

Shazam! was another hit for the DCEU and is proof that the company is on a roll, showing that Warner Bros may have learned from their lessons. The movie might not have had a gargantuan box office debut but it was still a lot (more than $50 million) and the positive reviews ensure that more people will watch it. Plus, the movie only cost $90 million to make, which is cheaper than most superhero films these days.

Yeah, we know, saying that $90 million is cheap can be kind of cringe-inducing since we all want to make that kind of money, but what can you do?

Anyway, director David F. Sandberg recently talked about the movie and, surprisingly, brought up the benefits that come with a smaller budget. While speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, which is nice to hear.

"I still would've taken on the challenge, but yeah, the higher the budget, the bigger the risk of failure.So, it certainly feels safer and more comfortable with having a somewhat lower budget. We just would've been more comfortable rather than anything. For example, we could've shot the carnival indoors. Talking to people on set who had worked on bigger movies, they were basically saying that if this had twice the budget, we wouldn't be out in the middle of the night in Toronto winter shooting all of the carnival stuff, because you could just build a replica of that carnival indoors. When we first started talking about how to shoot all these things, I was in my sort of normal low-budget mode and thinking, ‘Well, we could just cheat it like this' or ‘We don't have to actually do that.' The line producer, Jeffrey Chernov, actually took me aside and said, ‘As a line producer, I don't usually say this, but you should think bigger. You don't have to think so much in the low budget that you're used to.' Then, I feltmore freeto just come up with cool shit until he eventually said, ‘Okay, that's too big. Let's scale it back a little bit.'"

This isn't the only successful superhero movie with a small budget. Deadpool was notoriously known for having a small budget and it showed, though they made the most out of it. This made for some fairly creative scenes that ended up being hilarious. Shazam had similar moments and it made for a really fun, kid-friendly showing.

Shazam is now showing in theaters.

Read: Shazam! 2 is Happening, Original Director and Writer Returning for the Sequel