
#The hunter call of the wild twitter movie
After “The Irishman” came out, there were examples on the Internet of movie fans applying their own homegrown amateur de-aging process to the film’s characters - and lo and behold, some of those images didn’t look too bad.

And since the de-aging process, like the digital dog in “The Call of the Wild,” came in for its share of critical brickbats, you have to wonder, at least for a moment, why the film was so expensive. If, for the sake of argument, you took the de-aging process out of it, there’s a way that you could imagine a perfectly fine version of “The Irishman” made for $40 million. Scorsese’s film has some violent action and period crowd spectacle, but it’s basically a three-and-a-half-hour movie about men sitting around talking in rooms. Now that “The Irishman” has come and gone, though, consider the total oddity of that. (The official tally was $165 million, but there have been persistent unconfirmed reports that the budget may have been as high as $200 million.) It brings to mind another example of the same phenomenon, and that’s “ The Irishman.” For months - years! - before Martin Scorsese’s mob epic was released, there was so much publicity surrounding the digital de-aging process that ballooned the film’s budget that by the time the movie actually arrived, we all just sort of accepted that “The Irishman,” bankrolled by Netflix, cost as much as a top-heavy Marvel spectacular. The mid-budget film that caught budget-itis. “The Call of the Wild” is an example of a new phenomenon: the “mid-budget film” with a budget that got swelled like an overfed goose liver. But given the budget, even the film’s relatively successful opening of $24.8 million may not be good enough. This weekend, “The Call of the Wild” did more business than many observers expected, which only goes to show that there’s still a hunger for a sweetly traditional and wholesome dog-meets-man movie.

But can we stop for a moment to consider how profoundly counterintuitive that is? Animated films are famously expensive, but if you’re going to make a drama like “The Call of the Wild” and avoid using actual dogs that have to be directed and filmed in some frozen location that’s doubling for the Yukon, the process should theoretically be cheaper. The inflated budget, of course, is due mostly to the CGI technology.

I’m shocked every time I read that figure, because it just doesn’t feel right. The only surprise about “The Call of the Wild” is its price tag.
