History Main / ShootTheMoney

* While it's toned down in following and preceding works, the ''Anime/GhostInTheShell Innocence'' team must have spent a ton of money on the CGI exterior and flyby shots, and they're damn well going to show them to you.

* ''The New Adventures Of Captain Scarlet'': Gerry Anderson Productions had spent a small fortune acquiring the latest and greatest in CGI animation technology and talent, and by 'eck they were going to give it a workout. SceneryPorn, TechnologyPorn, and all the elaborate and detailed visual effects they could devise ensued. Episodes like "Swarm" and "Rain of Terror" were rather obviously [[StarringSpecialEffects written around a fancy new trick the techies had come up with]], but the results did look pretty damn cool.

* ''Franchise/StarWars'': The iconic opening space battle of ''Film/ANewHope'' was actually due to this trope. The ship that was originally the ''Millennium Falcon'' was decided to be too close in appearance to a ship from ''Series/Space1999'', so they rushed out a new design at the last minute. In the meantime, the original ''Falcon'''s model was repurposed as the ''Tantive IV'',[[note]]After altering the model by replacing ''Falcon'''s 4-seat cockpit with a distinctive hammerhead bridge module since the ''Tantive IV'' is meant to be a much larger ship; this had the added benefit of it no longer resembling the ''Space 1999'' Eagle Transporter.[[/note]] Princess Leia's blockade runner. The model for the ''Tantive IV'' was twice as large and detailed as any other model made for the movie, but it only is in the film for around a minute.

-->-- '''Crow''', ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000: Film/PodPeople''

* ''Franchise/StarWars'': The iconic opening space battle of ''Film/ANewHope'' was actually due to this trope. The ship that was originally the ''Millennium Falcon'' was decided to be too close in appearance to a ship from ''Series/Space1999'', so they rushed out a new design at the last minute. In the meantime, the original ''Falcon'''s model was repurposed as the ''Tantive IV'', Princess Leia's blockade runner. The model for the ''Tantive IV'' was twice as large and detailed as any other model made for the movie, but it only is in the film for around a minute.

* In ''Series/SweetHome'' they appear to have paid handsomely for the rights to use the song ''Warrior'' by ''Music/ImagineDragons'', because it accompanies multiple action scenes throughout the first season and they play quite a lot of it each time.

* ''Film/{{Armageddon}}'' has a large number of gratuitous shots of helicopters. They were clearly getting the most out of those rentals.

When a television or movie production has paid a lot of money for an extra-special effect, prop or to get to an exotic location, then they are damn well going to get their money's worth. So we see a lot of that big budget item:

** Zigzagged on Conan's last couple of weeks on NBC, where a pissed-off Conan decided to waste as much of NBC's money as he could. He pitched sketches along the lines of "purchased fossil of a ground sloth from the Smithsonian spraying an original Picasso with beluga caviar". However, all those sketches used either cheap substitutes or rentals. The music played in those segments, on the other hand, all had impossibly high royalty payments for even short snippets (playing "Satisfaction" by Music/TheRollingStones off the original master tapes isn't cheap). In fact, the music rights are so expensive that NBC cannot rerun it without paying tens of thousands of dollars per ''clip''. And that's part of the reason why O'Brien's NBC run has been [[MissingEpisode more or less locked away forever]].

See also StockFootage, SceneryPorn, PropRecycling, BigBudgetBeefUp, WidescreenShot, LeaveTheCameraRunning.

* ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' had a $10.5 million budget, and $6.5 million of it went to special effects. The first twenty-three minutes of the film is showing off the actors in the monkey suits (one real chimp was used for a baby), the space stations, and the moon colonies.

* ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' had a $10.5 million budget, and $6.5 million of it went to special effects. The first thirty minutes of the film is showing off the actors in the monkey suits (one real chimp was used for a baby), the space stations, and the moon colonies.

** A Brazilian and Venezuelan fad during TheNineties and early Nougties was to build their own BuildingOfAdventure location, namely a small town (usually only the facades, but still), or a department store. In an infamous case, an entire small mall set was built, but when the soap tanked and the set became too expensive to maintain, they ''blew it up'' on camera to do the double feat of disposing of the set and adding more drama to the plot (incidentally [[DropABridgeOnThem using the explosion to dispose of the most unpopular characters]]).

** {{Inverted|trope}} on Conan's last couple of weeks on NBC, where a pissed-off Conan decided to waste as much of NBC's money as he could. He pitched sketches along the lines of "purchased fossil of a ground sloth from the Smithsonian spraying an original Picasso with beluga caviar" (all such sketches naturally used cheap substitutes), and the music all had impossibly high royalty payments, and all for a single sketch or episode. In fact, the music rights are so expensive that NBC cannot rerun it without paying tens of thousands of dollars per ''clip''. And that's part of the reason why O'Brien's NBC run has been [[MissingEpisode more or less locked away forever]].

* If it is an expensive locale, then we see lots scenes of the characters traveling through the iconic scenery. Especially in very scenic locations like Hawaii.

* ''Series/PowerRangersTurbo'' premiered with a movie. While in the movie the Rangers only morphed once, they also got a much more elaborate morph sequence than prior morphs. This unfortunately ate into the episodes' run times, as the whole sequence took about two minutes, which would fly okay in a 90-minute movie but not a 22-minute episode. Notably, when four-fifths of the cast were swapped out mid-season, the replacement morph sequence was significantly shorter and less detailed.

* An unfortunate example was the ''Series/RedDwarf'' episode "Pete". The episode featured a dinosaur realised through a combination of models and CGI, but this ended up taking so much out of the budget that it was one of the big contributions to a production crisis that resulted in several planned episodes (including the originally intended finale) having to be abandoned because they could no longer afford them. "Pete" ended up expanding from a single episode to a two-parter, in part because they could claw back some of the money by using more of the dinosaur.

** The model shot of the space station that opens [[Recap/DoctorWhoS23E1TheMysteriousPlanet "The Mysterious Planet"]] was the single most expensive special effects shot in the series up to that point; the show had just survived an attempt to cancel it that turned into an 18-month hiatus, and the producer spent lavishly on it to ensure that the show's return after its enforced hiatus made a big impact. The cost was offset by using it as an establishing shot in later episodes.

* ''Franchise/StarWars'': The iconic opening space battle of ''Film/ANewHope'' was actually due to this trope. The ship that was originally the ''Millennium Falcon'' was decided to be too close in appearance to a ship from another movie, so they rushed out a new design at the last minute. In the meantime, the original ''Falcon'''s model was repurposed as the ''Tantive IV'', Princess Leia's blockade runner. The model for the ''Tantive IV'' was twice as large and detailed as any other model made for the movie, but it only is in the film for around a minute.

[[folder:Film (Animated)]]

[[folder:Film (Live-Action)]]

* ''Film/StarTrekTheMotionPicture'' was kind of an odd case. Yes, there are a crapton of shots of the elaborate ''Enterprise'' model that clearly cost a lot to make. But that model wasn't made for the film, but rather for a putative {{sequel|series}} to [[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries the original TV series]] (planned in a scramble after the then-recent success of ''[[Film/ANewHope Star Wars]]''), where it would have been used more frequently. And the remaining effects were totally unusable, requiring the studio to scramble and get John Dykstra and Douglas Trumbull to work their rear ends off to make the final product, so the Paramount people figured that their hard work (and all that money) should probably be front-and-center in the movie. The problem was that doing so led to the deletion of several CharacterDevelopment scenes that were important to the film.

* ''Franchise/{{Stargate}}'':

* ''Film/{{Titanic 1997}}'' was the most expensive film made up to that point, and damned if you don't see every penny of it. The film is festooned with travelling shots showcasing the digital ship, inside and out, and showing the level of research that went into replicating the ship. The scene of the ship's sinking is long, drawn-out, and basically in real time.

** One of the reasons K-9 was added to the cast was because his prop was too expensive to build solely for the character's planned role as quirky set dressing in a one-shot story. Unfortunately, the prop was badly made and the remote control interfered with the cameras, meaning the prop had to be replaced multiple times, negating the initial point.

* The producers of ''Series/TheGrahamNortonShow'' originally built the Big Red Chair for a one-off segment as a tribute to ''[[Series/TheTwoRonnies Ronnie Corbett]]'' but the prop and the associated hydraulics were so expensive that they turned it into a regular segment, which quickly became a trademark, to close each show to justify the cost.

** The model shot of the space station that opens [[Recap/DoctorWhoS23E1TheMysteriousPlanet "The Mysterious Planet"]] was the single most expensive was the single most expensive special effects shot in the series up to that point; the show had just survived an attempt to cancel it that turned into an 18-month hiatus, and the producer spent lavishly on it to ensure that the show's return after its enforced hiatus made a big impact. The cost was offset by using it as an establishing shot in later episodes.

** The model shot of the space station that opens [[DoctorWhoS23E1TheMysteriousPlanet "The Mysterious Planet"]] was the single most expensive was the single most expensive special effects shot in the series up to that point; the show had just survived an attempt to cancel it that turned into an 18-month hiatus, and the producer spent lavishly on it to ensure that the show's return after its enforced hiatus made a big impact. The cost was offset by using it as an establishing shot in later episodes.

*** There were also minor things which were incredibly detailed and never shown on screen. For instance, in ''[[Film/TheLordOfTheRingsTheReturnOfTheKing Return of the King]]'', Éowyn wears an intricate dress for a scene in which she's only shot from the chest up (a fact lamented on the DVDCommentary by Creator/MirandaOtto), and Théoden's breastplate had beautiful and intricate stitching and details on the ''inside'' -- but Creator/BernardHill still thinks it made it on screen in a sense, because it made him ''feel'' like a king when wearing it.

* ''Film/StarshipTroopers'': The uniforms and helmets made for the movie would be used again and again in other science fiction productions, such as an episode of ''Series/Firefly''.