Budget-Busting Element

"If they're gonna be that foolish with their money, then I guess that means we can be foolish with their money. Like spending a bunch of it on a computer-generated cartoon elephant that has nothing to do with the rest of the episode. [a cartoon elephant skips across the screen] Did you see that? Know what that cost? $58,000. I mean, what a waste. It wasn't even that funny. That's $58,000 that could've gone to curing leukemia. Or muscular dystrophy. Or... what does Michael J. Fox have? That."

— Opening Scroll, Family Guy, "Something Something Something Dark Side"

There are many important aspects to consider when budgeting a project. High-quality sets, lighting, and sound equipment aren't cheap, and all the cast and crew need to be paid fairly and treated humanely to ensure good performances and good graces. But some directors insist that one element deserves far more attention than the rest, and will direct as much money as possible towards making that thing as good as it can be — even if it means cutting corners for the rest of the work or going outside of your budget altogether.

Alternatively, the cost may not be too outlandish by budgetary standards...except this element only shows up for an extremely brief amount of time (such as a scene shot on-location at a famous monument for less than a minute or a Celebrity Cameo from an expensive A-lister).

Compare and contrast No Budget; a budget-breaking element may result in the rest of the work appearing as if they had no money to begin with. However, if a work was already designed around having No Budget, they may toss their extra money towards something gratuitous just to flaunt their own wealth. See also Shoot the Money, when the expensive item is utilized as much as possible to account for the cost. May lead to a Troubled Production and/or the work being a Creator Killer if the risks don't lead to big enough rewards. See What Could Have Been for some cut ideas that the director decided weren't worth the expense.

Some aspects that can require more money than the rest of the film:

• A scene employing a lot of unique visual effects, such as an alien world or a Disney Acid Sequence. This could be due to the amount of time and effort spent building an original set, or due to the use of expensive CGI technology (though the latter has become increasingly more common and accessible to filmmakers). This is especially true for fully animated sequences.
• Filming on-location in a profitable space, such as a landmark; renting out the space so no tourists interfere while filming will likely necessitate millions of dollars to compensate for the loss in revenue.
• Particularly expensive props, such as a Cool Car, especially if they get destroyed in a fight scene.
• Hiring an All-Star Cast, or even just one actor with a much bigger paycheck than their colleagues.
• Legal fees to any other sort of expensive intellectual property, especially the rights to play a certain song. Even mere seconds of a particularly expensive pop song can send a film's budget to shambles.

In fiction, this may be exaggerated to illustrate a Prima Donna Director's Skewed Priorities. Some shows may even waste the producers' money deliberately (or at least joke about doing it) to take Biting-the-Hand Humor to the extreme.

Please only list examples confirmed by Word of God or within the work itself, not audience speculation on where the budget must have gone.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Carnival Phantasm: Parodied in the first and second episodes' Tiger Dojos. In the first one, Taiga is so excited about the Dojo finally being animated that she goes hog-wild with ultra-fluid movement. This blows so much of the animation budget (325,500 yen in 23 seconds) that in the second episode, she's just black-and-white line art, while Ilya has no intermediate frames.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: During the production of the series in 2002, Production I.G ended up setting a new record for the highest budget spent on any anime production for its time. Much of the money went towards showing off new animation technologies in 3D Cel Shading, specifically on vehicles such as helicopters, cars, and especially the Tachikomas themselves. The entire series could've just been done in traditional 2D animation, but it was a choice to render the vehicles in 3D and apply lighting filters to make them look 2D.

Films — Animated

• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: A large part of the budget was spent animating Aki's hair, which consisted of 60,000 individually rendered hairs.
• Inside Out: The soft, bubbly texture on the emotions was extraordinarily expensive. At first, Joy was the only one who had it, but after eight months, the animators decided to scrap it because it was becoming ridiculously cost-prohibitive. Unfortunately for them, Pixar head John Lasseter saw the texture on Joy and loved it, declaring "Put that on all the characters!" Ralph Eggleston, the production designer, joked: "You could hear the core technical staff just hitting the ground, the budget falling through the roof."
• In The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a five-second-long gag involving a mule struggling to stay afloat in a river during a rainstorm was called "the most expensive shot in the movie" due to the added models and water effects. It was deemed Worth It:
  Bean Counters: You sure you want to spend this for just one joke?
  Christopher Miller: Yes.
• Out of the $290,000 budget for Sita Sings the Blues, $5,000 were spent on music royalties.
• To date, Treasure Planet was the most expensive traditionally animated film in history, with a budget of $140 million. Because it was the first Disney film released with an IMAX release in mind, most of that budget was dedicated to integrating CGI and hand-drawn elements and creating immaculate line-work suitable for such a high-quality screen. The film was a financial failure, only grossing $109 million.

Films — Live-Action

• 24-Hour Party People is a Very Loosely Based On A Real Story account of the history of Factory Records (see the Music section below) that had a series of bad luck with money. We see producer Martin Hannet run up his bill by taking his sweet time recording Joy Division' debut album, New Order's first single costing more to print than its sales price and then selling a record amount of copies all at a loss, the money sink of the Hacienda night club first being empty most nights only to later be taken over by a crowd that doesn't buy drinks, the Troubled Production of Happy Mondays' second album and Tony Wilson buying a ridiculously expensive designer conference table for their office.
• American Graffiti was made on a low budget ($777,000 in 1973 money) and more than a tenth of that ($80,000) was spent on music licensing.
• The Bonfire of the Vanities second unit director Eric Schwab spent $80,000 on a five-camera shot of a Concorde landing in New York City to capture a once-a-year sunset against a runway at JFK Airport. The length of that shot? Ten seconds. Julie Salamon's 1991 book The Devil's Candy about the film's production dedicates an entire chapter to the shot and Schwab won a bet that the shot ended up in the final film at all. The film's opening title sequence was almost as expensive, to say nothing of the amount of money and effect spent on the nearly five-minute-long tracking shot that opens the film.
• Most of the reason the 2020 adaptation of The Call of the Wild had a budget north of $125 million was that all of the film’s animals were created using CG. This is especially the case with Buck, who was primarily created with a mocap actor.
• A large portion of A Christmas Story's $3.3 million budget was spent on an ultimately Deleted Scene. The scene features Ralphie having an Imagine Spot taking place in the Flash Gordon universe where he uses the Red Ryder BB gun to save Gordon from Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo. Despite the resources used to create the scene, including the large soundstage and set for the planet, the scene was forced to be cut by the studio to keep the runtime close to 90 minutes.
• Cleopatra infamously went over budget and fell behind schedule to become one of the biggest Box Office disasters in history. The catalyst? Elizabeth Taylor sarcastically saying she'd take the title role for $1 million. She was granted this, becoming the first actor to ever be paid that amount for a film. She fell ill with pneumonia while shooting in England, and the expenses included in her fee led to her being paid over $2 million before any usable footage had been shot.
• The unproduced Muppet movie script, The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made provides an in-universe example. In the film, Gonzo is trying to make a film based on a nonsensical script that he wrote. It's supposed to be a globetrotting mystery. Unfortunately, he blows half the budget on the opening credits forcing him to cut more and more corners until eventually a single street corner is standing in for every location. Ironically, the film was never made because of how expensive the cost was of making was estimated.
• The General: The film's total budget was $750,000 (in 1926), of which approximately $42,000 was spent on a fifteen-second-long shot of a train crashing from a burning bridge into a river. It was the single most expensive shot in silent movie history. This was because it was a genuine train being crashed into the river and had six cameras filming at once to ensure they caught it because they could only do the stunt once (the wreckage remained submerged until it was salvaged for scrap in World War II).
• Heaven's Gate ended up costing approximately $44 million (in 1970s money) to make. Amongst the many things that Michael Cimino did that ramped up the budget:
  • Based the production office in Kalispell, Montana, but chose a shooting location (Glacier National Park) that was a further two-and-half hour drive away, meaning that the entire crew earned five hours pay just driving to and from the set, essentially going into overtime pay every single day
  • Forced the studio to buy acres of Montana land months in advance so that he could plant grass in the early spring because he had a vision of shooting the climactic final sequences in a field of autumn grass
  • Demanded that the buildings on both sides of a western town set be torn down and rebuilt a few feet wider apart, at a cost of $1.2 million, all the while overruling the crew's objections that it would be much cheaper and easier to tear down only one side and move it the full distance away.
  • Demanded that a period-appropriate steam train be transported to the shoot location even though its obsolete gauge meant that it would require a detour through five different states, increasing the amount spent on it from $15k to $150k.
• I Am Legend spent about $5 million alone on the bridge collapse scene, due to a combination of expensive CGI and the extensive costs and bureaucracy of shooting a destructive action scene on-location in New York City.
• Imitation of Life (1959) was a modestly budgeted melodrama, where $1 million reportedly went to Lana Turner's wardrobe, because they intended to use the Costume Porn to draw in a large female audience, making it the most expensive wardrobe in cinema at the time.
• King Kong (1976): Nearly $2 million of the film's $24 million budget (ballooned from an initial $16 million) was spent on a full-body, forty-foot-tall King Kong animatronic. It was intended to be used for the majority of the movie, but it proved inoperable (even breaking down once during filming) and looked unconvincing, so it only appears for about ten seconds total in the final film, while most of the rest was Rick Baker in an ape suit.
• King Richard had an overall budget of about fifty million USD. Forty million was used just to get Will Smith on to play the main character (the film ended up making slightly less than forty million at the box office, despite excellent reviews, in part due to releasing simultaneously on streaming).
• Little Shop of Horrors: It is estimated that approximately one-fifth of the films $25 million budget was spent on the originally filmed Downer Ending where the Audrey II plants take over New York, a sequence that makes heavy use of elaborate puppetry and miniature effects. The scene was cut and replaced with a happier ending after negative test screenings.
• The Matrix Reloaded spent $2.5 million to construct and destroy a freeway set for a car chase scene.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail was made on a shoestring budget of just $400,000 — reportedly, a large chunk of that was spent just on the pyrotechnics for the Tim the Enchanter scene. Parodied during the film's opening credits, which are twice interrupted after going on bizarre tangents about moose, and are eventually finished "at the last minute and at great expense", implying that most of the film's budget went on the opening sequence.
• About a tenth of the multi-million-dollar budget for Spectre went to destroying luxury cars in action scenes, particularly several Aston Martin models specifically produced for the film.
• $25 million of the $160 million budget for Speed 2: Cruise Control, almost as much as the entire budget for the first film, was spent on the climatic scene of the cruise ship crashing into Saint Martin, which included a large village set and a full-scale model of the ship’s bow.
• Street Fighter had a budget of $35 million, of which $8 million was spent — at Capcom's insistence — on hiring Jean-Claude Van Damme to play protagonist Guile. To balance out the books, a number of roles had to be filled by unknown actors, and some of the special effects ended up being quite shoddy because there wasn't enough money left for anything better. Worse still, the casting of the conspicuously Belgian Van Damme as the canonically all-American Guile ended up being a notorious case of Questionable Casting.
• Superman Returns spent $10 million on Superman's return to Krypton due to the high cost of animation at the time. Unfortunately, this became a Deleted Scene due to clashing with the rest of the film's tone.
• Although it enjoyed a modest financial return, Simon Wells' The Time Machine used a significant portion of its budget on the props in Alexander's laboratory, namely the Time Machine itself and his collection of pocket watches.
• Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie: In-Universe. A big reason the Show Within a Show Bonjour, Diamond Jim cost a billion dollars to make was because Tim and Eric insisted on having the protagonist wear a suit covered in thousands of genuine diamonds. It ate up so much of the budget that they could only afford to shoot three minutes of footage, and they had to cast a Celebrity Impersonator as Diamond Jim instead of the real Johnny Depp.
• Tropic Thunder: In-universe, the titular Film Within a Film goes wildly over budget because they spent millions on the opening shot that didn't have anyone filming it. The fix involves making the film more grounded to cut overhead costs and to get the picture out on time. Les Grossman even says that the death of one of the actors would be more profitable (on an insurance claim) than the film would ever make.
• Vanilla Sky spent $1 million of its $68 million budget renting out all of Times Square to film a short but symbolic scene where David dreams about the bustling city being completely empty.
• According to Joss Whedon, the various things that drove up the budget on Waterworld was a functional water tank set constructed on the ocean, a personal chef for Kevin Costner, and a VFX team devoted to digitally hiding Costner's receding hairline. The result of these many expenses was the most expensive shoot in history up until the release of Titanic.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica (2003): A significant chunk of the Season 3 budget was used for "Exodus Part 1" and "Exodus Part 2" right at the start of the season. Somewhat downplayed in that those two episodes are considered some of the best episodes of the season, if not the whole show, and have several iconic moments including the Adama Maneuvre. However, it also meant that the rest of the season lacked action or major set pieces. As a result, the season ended up running on a much slower pace, and had a few meandering episodes that are considered the worst in the show.
• Charmed (1998): Holly Marie Combs later said that the infamously slashed Season 8 budget meant that Brian Krause had to be written out for ten episodes because of the celebrity guest stars the network was demanding. In the interview she specifically said Nick Lachey, but since he guest starred in Season 7, she may have been confusing him with Jason Lewis, who was the special guest star in Season 8.
• Community
  • The first Paintball Episode was incredibly popular with fans and agreed to be the episode where the show grew its beard, but it was really expensive because the episode's very premise demanded they Trash the Set, so the show had to handle all future paintball episodes very carefully—from relegating it to the season finale where they could afford to go nuts to replacing it in the lower-budget seasons with pillow fights (and one snippet in a parodic Clip Show episode) and hot lava games to making the last one a pastiche of Spy Fiction about Frankie banning paintball on the Greendale campus.
  • Because "Paradigms of Human Memory" spoofed the concept of a Clip Show by making all the things the study group flashes back to various Noodle Incidents instead of actual past episodes, it was actually the most expensive episode of Season 2 besides the aforementioned Paintball Episode, so the episode in between had to be a Bottle Episode.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: At the end of the song "Love Kernels", Rebecca breaks the fourth wall to say that the artsy music video, with its various scene changes and costumes to symbolize Rebecca's Love Martyr status, ate up the show's production budget, so they now have to recast Darryl with a broom. Word of God confirmed this song actually did use a good chunk of the production budget.
  Rachel Bloom: But yes, that number was expensive — we went out to the desert for a day in pre-production to film those sweeping desert scenes, we built another set on stage with all that lavish, beautiful furniture. The costumes alone, I mean especially that cactus costume, it's expensive.
• Doctor Who: Showrunner Russell T Davies' inexperience with managing a sci-fi show resulted in most of the budget for series 1 being spent on the revival series' second episode, which featured heavy use of expensive CGI and elaborate practical alien effects and costumes. The reduced budget for the rest of the season is why many of the other episodes of series 1 have a contemporary UK setting.
• Game of Thrones: In the later seasons, Dany's dragons ended up eating a significant chunk of the CGI budget, which led to the Stark siblings' direwolves being written out of the series, as well as the Golden Company losing their war elephants in the final season.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981) had two disproportionately big spends on relatively small elements.
  • Firstly, the prosthetic second head for Zaphod Beeblebrox, which only intermittently worked, consumed more time and money than had been budgeted for.
  • Secondly, the animation sequences representing The Guide itself. These were done with conventional cel animation, to represent CGI which would in 1980 have been way ahead of what computing could actually do. This also cost a bomb — but did work.
• Lost:
  • In the episode, "Tricia Tanaka is Dead", a random meteorite destroys Mr Cluck's Chicken Shack, killing the Episode's title character and her cameraman. Despite the scene having not much importance to the episode or the series, it was alleged to be one of the most expensive shots in Lost, according to Visual Effects Supervisor Kevin Blank.
  • During Season 4, Alan Dale was slated to appear in two separate episodes. However, Dale could not leave London, due to his stage commitments to the West End's production of Spamalot. Instead of writing him out, production decided to film Dale's scenes on location in London. This meant flying Michael Emerson, Kim Yunjin, and a crew out to London. In addition, Charles Widmore's apartment had to be built at Shepperton Studios, to be featured in "The Shape of Things to Come".
  • Averted for "The End". The finale was intended to feature a volcanic eruption on the island, during the climatic fight between the Man in Black and Jack. Despite it being the Grand Finale, the network actually shot the idea down, due to the Final Season already being expensive. The show would ultimately change the location of the fight to a stormy cliffside.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: During the host segments of The Incredible Melting Man, Crow's screenplay for Earth vs. Soup is bought by the Mads and greenlit. They land a budget of $30 million, but between bonuses for Pearl and Clayton and several fees such as insurance and a completion bond, Crow is only given $800 to work with. And they expect him to get Kevin Bacon to star. This is meant as a Take That! to how the crew was treated when shooting The MST3K Movie.
• Only Murders in the Building features an in-universe example; one of the major expenses that caused Oliver's musical adaptation of Splash to go over budget was an elaborate set that was supposed to open onto an actual pool of water. Unfortunately for Oliver, the hydraulics failed during previews, and when the chorus boys all dove for the pool, they hit the stage instead, causing multiple injuries and a string of expensive insurance investigations.
• Power Rangers S.P.D. infamously blew so much of their budget on the final battle between the SPD SWAT Megazord and Grumm’s fortress that they didn’t have any money to have an actual actor for the Omega Ranger to have an actual identity outside the suit.
• Sense8 features a globe-spanning ensemble cast, with scenes set in San Francisco, Chicago, Mexico, Iceland, Germany, Kenya, India and South Korea. All shot on location, and with the effect of the telepathy being represented by characters appearing in the same space with each other, that meant filming with the full main cast at all locations.
• The Sopranos: In the episode "Proshai, Livushka", the producers had to deal with the fact Livia's actress died between Seasons 2 and 3, so they hastily made a brief last scene between her and Tony using a Digital Headswap which cost $250,000 for about 90 seconds of altered footage (although the production company behind the effect cut the bill in half in hopes of gaining publicity). Each episode cost about $2-6 million total to make (with the budget growing larger with each season).
• Conan O'Brien invoked this during his last weeks hosting The Tonight Show in an effort to spite NBC for their controversial treatment of his hosting era, making a point to introduce one-shot characters who weren't really that funny, but would cost NBC boatloads of money to put on the air. The biggest example was the "Bugatti Veyron Mouse," a very expensive car decorated like a mouse, accompanied by the original recording of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," which Conan claimed would cost NBC $1.5 million. (Though it may not be that high, as the car was likely on loan or at least a less expensive model than presented.)

Music

• Fleetwood Mac ended up paying $1,4 million, the highest budget for an album at the time, for the recording of "Tusk" as they ended up building a new studio while also paying for studio rentals during the building process.
• Korn racked up a total bill of $4 million to produce the album "Untouchables", largely from all the band members renting out separate mansions to live in during the recording process.
• Lady Gaga almost went bankrupt from the "Monster Ball" tour, which while selling out at every stop, featured a massive stage and large retinue of performers and at the lowest, Gaga was $3 million in debt.
• The first verse of One-Hit Wonder song "This Is Why I'm Hot" by MIMS features shout-outs to different regional hip hop scenes, paired with short samples from "Jesus Walks" by Kanye West, "Tell Me When To Go" by E40, "Nuthin but a G Thang" by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and "Shook Ones pt II" by Mobb Deep, with the licencing on the samples eating a lion's share of the royalties.
• Frequent problem for Factory Records, as fictionalized in 24-Hour Party People (see Film section above)
  • The sleeve for the 12" single for "Blue Monday" by New Order required a complicated process of pressing different size holes, making the original run of the single cost more to make than it sold for. As the single became a hit, later print runs were made with a more conventional sleeve, but the story of the original sleeve mutated into an Urban Legend that the single lost Factory Records money by becoming a hit. Label impresario Tony Wilson was more than happy to perpetuate the myth.
  • The label's flagship nightclub, Hacienda, was a massive money sink, early on for not drawing in large crowds, and later when it did become a hotspot for the Acid house scene, the larger turnout didn't translate to drink sales, as people got their kicks from ecstasy.
  • Happy Mondays pissed away a lot of the label's money in recording "...Yes Please!" in Barbados, where the band switched their earlier heroin problem for a crack problem, and even stole and sold some studio equipment for drug money, although Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, whose studio they recorded at, say they only stole some deck furniture.
  • In a less egregious incident before the Barbados debacle, New Order did also spend a lengthy and expensive stretch of time in Ibiza, recording "Technique"
• Pink Floyd went in the red for the extremely elaborate stage tour of The Wall, with only keyboard player Rick Wright, who had been fired from the band proper, but hired as a performer for the tour, was the only one to make money, as he was paid a salary instead of a share from the profit. The nightly performance of the album necessitated the construction of a large wall across the whole stage and elaborate massive puppets based on the Gerald Scarfe animations in the movie.

Music Videos

• The video for Custom's "Hey Mister," shot on No Budget with a handheld camera with the artist and his girlfriend going to the beach, was almost finished when the label gave the band more money. Most of the money was spent on a luxury car and a trip to Vegas, with the rest of the video still using that cheap handheld camera.

Video Games

• Parodied to Hell and back in the Deadpool game by High Moon Studios with the Running Gag of Deadpool doing something insane, getting a call from High Moon Studios informing him that he broke the budget, and then getting a brief Genre Shift into some retraux level. During the end credits, he gets a call from High Moon Studios again telling him he never really broke the budget, which prompts him to set off a large amount of explosives that break the budget for real.
• The need to keep up to date with the latest engine and fanciest graphics doomed Duke Nukem Forever and took down George Broussard's career with him (3D Realms barely survived this one). Forever began to be developed in id Software's Id Tech 2 engine (the same one that powered Quake II and SiN). Before development started on the game, it was decided that Epic Games's Unreal Engine 1 (Unreal and Unreal Tournament) was the engine of choice; the 2001 leaked version was even running under this engine. By the time they switched to Valve Software's Source engine, they had more or less a working game and were putting the final touches. Then they switched to Unreal Engine 2, but by then the game just went overbudget and the morale of the team was quite low; 5 years later the game was cancelled, and Gearbox Software (already having established a name by themselves thanks to the Sleeper Hit Borderlands) bought the franchise and resumed development in the game, finally managing to finish and release the game.
• The infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial game cost at least $20 million to obtain the license to E.T. alone. It was developed in less than five weeks, sold fewer than three million copies overall, and unsold copies of it and other pieces of Atari hardware and software were buried in a landfill in the middle of New Mexico. E.T is widely blamed for the The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, but it was just the straw that broke the shovelware-laden camel's back.
• As shared by various Ritual Entertainment employees (among them former Ritual QA Manager Michael Russell), the SiN franchise and the company itself weren't sunk by the lack of success of SiN Episodes: Emergence; the game actually did well enough to fund most of the planned 9 episodes. It was instead all the resources spent on a failed Quake IV expansion pack called Quake IV: Awakening, whose development was dropped after the main game didn't perform as expected. This led to Emergence having a very short budget (and the reuse of Half-Life 2 assets due to the game using the Source game engine) and later Ritual being sold to MumboJumbo and dissolved.
• Too Human was, at the time of its release, estimated to have a budget of between $60-$100 million USD, due to the fact that development moved from the Playstation to the Nintendo Gamecube before ending up on the Xbox 360, and the shift in SKUs required development to restart from scratch. Developer Silicon Knights ended up trying to save money by not paying Epic Games's licensing fee for its Unreal Engine, a move which resulted in a legal battle that eventually led to the destruction of all unsold physical copies of the game and the shuttering of Silicon Knights.
• According to former Legend Entertainment mapper Matthias Worch, the dip in quality of Unreal II: The Awakening had to do with the team trying to cram as many things as possible into the TCA Atlantis intermission sequences. They ended up diverting resources into those sections that didn't feature shooting in a game that's basically a First-Person Shooter.
  Matthias Worch: If you ask yourself "What is the game about?" and break down a game by its core gameplay mechanics, the main component of the game, the shooting, had better be present in all major parts of the game. Unreal 2 is a First-Person Shooter. And you don't shoot on Atlantis. Instead, you do all the things that slow down the shooting action during an actual mission: exploration and talking. (...) I love the ambition and effort that we put into the level. It works. But all that effort also distracted and took resources from the other areas of the game that could have used extra help. Putting more focus on the Kai (our version of the Nali) for example. Or finishing the SP missions I had to abandon during development.

Web Videos

• Parodied by Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition. In a bonus video about the making of the game, an anonymous member of Sonic Team admits that they had a lot of money left over and decided to splurge on a bunch of computer-animated 3D segments that served no purpose beyond looking cool. Then those 3D segments ended up running significantly over budget—and now Sonic Team will be in deep financial trouble if the game doesn't sell.
• Happens In-Universe in the DEATH BATTLE! episode pitting Deadpool against the Mask when Deadpool takes out a seventh Infinity Gem he calls the "Continuity Gem". Attempting to use it to make Ipkiss take off the mask results in him blowing the budget and sending both combatants back to the storyboard. The Mask decides the best way to fix this is for him and Deadpool to raise money in the real world (depicted by a live-action segment) to finish the episode.
• Sarah Z once ranted about how her high school production of Legally Blonde blew most of its budget on renting a golf cart that would be on stage for thirty seconds, and as a result their next year's production of Into the Woods had to use minimalistic sets.
• Achievement Hunter: The exact price for licencing whole movies for Theater Mode was never openly stated, but Geoff Ramsey has inferred that it was the most expensive show the group ever made.

Western Animation

• Chowder: During the episode "Shopping Spree", the main cast goes overboard spending money on luxury items when they were meant to just buy a replacement machine; they go completely broke, which results in the animation ceasing and the show temporarily switching to live-action as the voice actors organize a car wash to raise enough money to get back into animated form.
• Family Guy:
  • In "You May Now Kiss the... Uh... Guy Who Receives", Quagmire randomly launches into the chorus of "Witch Doctor" when refusing to sign Brian's petition. On the commentary track, Seth MacFarlane called it "the $10,000 joke" because of how much they had to pay to use the song.
  • In "Road to the Multiverse", the show receives an Animation Bump due to Brian and Stewie ending up in a Disney-style universe. Word of God states that the season's entire budget went towards animating that three-minute segment.
  • Family Guy Presents: Laugh It Up, Fuzzball: The opening crawl in "Something Something Something Dark Side" is full of Biting-the-Hand Humor at Fox for their lack of faith in the Star Wars franchise, boasting that if Fox can be foolish with their money, so can Family Guy. They then throw a random CG-animated elephant onscreen and point out that it wasted $58,000.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends: In-Universe. In "One False Movie", Mac is tasked with creating a movie to be shown at a film festival, with Bloo directing. Bloo immediately blows their budget for a megaphone (said to have once belonged to Cecil B. DeMille) to boss everyone around with, leaving Mac to sell some of his stuff online to scrounge up more money.
• Futurama: In-Universe. In "That's Lobstertainment!", post-production on Harold Zoid's movie is reduced to less than a week because they blew the budget on pies for a background pie fight.
• Invader Zim: "A Room with a Moose" has a scene with some computer-generated walnuts. On the episode commentary, Jhonen Vasquez jokes that they weren't meant to be CGI and it blew the entire animation budget for the season.
  Melissa Fahn: Is that right? Was it really expensive?
  Vasquez: Well, we were gonna have the season end with a giant space battle, but they had blown the budget on the walnuts, so... it was upsetting.
• This was the main reason why The Powerpuff Girls (1998) episode "Deja View" was scrapped and repurposed for the DC Comics series, since the visual effects costs for when the titular girls jumped to the Bizarro Universe went way over budget.
• The Simpsons: Parodied in "The Fight Before Christmas," where the final scene is done in puppetry and features Katy Perry as a Special Guest. Mr. Burns is only able to release one of his trademark hounds, which is just a cheap sock puppet because they blew the budget on Perry.
• Space Ghost Coast to Coast: Joked about (among many other things) in the low-budget show. According to Zorak, "every time I move my arm, it costs the Cartoon Network 42 bucks," and he then proceeds to demonstrate by barely shifting his arm and counting how much money even small movements cost and seeing how much money he can run up.
• Mentioned In-Universe in Star Warp'd, when Captain Kwirk asks where the crew is after they emerge from a time warp over modern-day Earth. Mr. Spuck replies "Not in the budget, Captain". Later lampshaded when they need an engineering miracle and Captain Kwirk says that he hopes Mr. Squat was spared by the budget cuts.
• The Venture Bros.: The season two premiere "Powerless in the Face of Death" uses the licensed song "Everybody's Free (To Feel Good)" by Rozalla in its opening montage. The creators had to fight tooth and nail with Cartoon Network as, according to creator Doc Hammer, the licensing cost 1/8 of the season's entire budget. They included some Biting-the-Hand Humor in both a later episode and the DVD Commentary (which includes a voicemail from a network exec initially denying them the money) poking fun at the situation. It was only after Hammer played them the scene cut to some (intentionally) awful music he had written that they agreed to pay for the rights.
• Wander over Yonder: In-Universe. In "The Cartoon" in Hater's cartoon, when it finally becomes time for The battle between Cartoon Hater and Cartoon Awesome, the camera just cuts to two Watchdogs watching the fight. When the real Hater complains about this, the Watchdogs reveal they blew all the animation budget on the Watchdogs fight, claiming they felt it was "more important to the narrative."

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