Jeb Bush, MAD MAX, & What $130-$150 Million Buys

MAD MAX and Jeb’s campaign cost the same but yielded very different results

Here’s a fun entry in the Read This With That canon.

First, this NYT piece headlined, “How Jeb Bush Spent $130 Million Running for President With Nothing to Show for It.”

When Jeb Bush formally entered the presidential campaign in June, there was already more money behind him than every other Republican candidate combined. When he suspended his campaign on Saturday night in South Carolina, Mr. Bush had burned through the vast majority of that cash without winning a single state. It may go down as one of the least successful campaign spending binges in history.

Second, this Vocativ piece, “Mad Max: Fury Road cost $20,833 per second.”

For every single second you sat in a movie theater watching Mad Max: Fury Road, the studio spent $20,000 producing it. Physically burning that amount of money so quickly is almost definitely impossible …

Mad Max, the post-apocalyptic chase movie starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, was this year’s most expensive Best Picture nod, costing an estimated $150 million, according to IMDb. With a runtime of 120 minutes, that works out to a spend of exactly $20,833 per second — that’s a lot of rusty hot-rods, staged explosions, and flamethrower fuel. For the cost of 50 seconds of Mad Max footage, you could buy a decent one-bed apartment in Manhattan.

Both Mad Max: Fury Road and the Jeb Bush campaign were slick, A-list releases with high production values. Both were sequels or reboots of once popular franchises whose first installments debuted decades ago. As both could depend on goodwill, name recognition, and familiarity with the source material, both were expected to do quite well.

Despite having so much in common, including their budgets, one exceeded expectations, becoming both commercially and critically successful; and the other flopped.

What can we learn from this?

DC and Hollywood are both comfortable spending vast amounts of money

Mad Max: Fury Road was a joint production of Village Roadshow (America), Village Roadshow (Australia), and Kennedy Miller (Australia). They put together the $150 million budget that has become standard for action flicks (and doesn’t even account for the costs of marketing and promotion).

The series has come a long way: the first Mad Max film was a cash-strapped indie, according to Mental Floss. Since it “only had a budget of $350,000, [director George] Miller scraped together extra money as an emergency room doctor to keep the movie going” and he paid various cast and crew-members in beer. As Vanity Fair points out, “The upshot of the tiny budget is that, for nearly 20 years, Mad Max — which grossed nearly $100 million worldwide — held the Guinness World Record for most profitable film (until it was unseated by The Blair Witch Project).”

Jeb’s campaign doesn’t list its producers on its IMDB page the same way, but according to the Times, it was mostly funded by country club types:

Instead of spending last winter on the hustings of Iowa and New Hampshire, Mr. Bush held off, using the first half of 2015 to raise money in places like New York, Chicago, Texas and Florida. His goal: Raise enough money for a super PAC to scare other candidates — especially those with a similar political profile — out of the race. Over the entire campaign, Mr. Bush’s team racked up tens of thousands of dollars in dinner and event tabs at the Yale Club, the Union League Club of Chicago, Nantucket’s Westmore Club, and more than two dozen other haunts of the well heeled and racquetball-inclined.

Just the valet parking for all those elites cost the campaign $15,800.

It takes a well-paid village

Putting together a national political campaign or a summer blockbuster requires the concerted joint effort of a huge number of people. Jeb paid 140 consulting companies for advice on his campaign; that cost him a total of $10 million. Fees to separate branding and PR experts cost over $88,000. Pizza to feed staff members cost almost $5,000. And there’s a whole category that the Times sums up without much explanation as “People.” Price tag: $8.3 million.

Action movies, likewise, require massive participation: “depending on the scale of a production, hundreds of VFX artists can spend months working on a film.” And then there’s cast and crew.

Even for lesser-known actors, pay can only go so low. Guild rules mandate that actors be paid at least $859 per day. On top of this pay, the actors also need “fringes,” money paid in accordance with Screen Actors Guild instructions to provide for benefits and pensions, among other things. Also included are the other crew members who are needed to make production and post-production go smoothly and turn in a high quality finished product. Over a 30-day or longer shoot, paying the cast and crew alone can add up quickly. The number of people on a crew can be exceptionally high — but as things get more and more complicated, with the addition of effects like explosives or gunfire, every single person on that crew becomes necessary to make sure things run smoothly and efficiently. As it turns out, paying a very large crew to run on time tends to be much cheaper than paying a slightly smaller crew and having to worry about paying overtime.

The stars don’t come cheap either.

Input does not guarantee output

Mad Max: Fury Road has taken in $377,000,000 worldwide and won numerous awards. After the Oscars, it may even find room on its mantel for more.

Jeb’s campaign, by contrast, ended in ignominy, as Jeb didn’t win, or even come close to winning, a single primary or caucus. No trophies for Jeb, just obits, some of which are perhaps kinder than he deserved.

And yet isn’t the Times being a little cruel in saying he had “nothing to show for” all the money he spent? Politics is a zero sum game. The vast majority of presidential candidates will find, no matter how much effort and money they put in, that at the end of several grueling years, they have not been elected to any new position. They’re all competing to sit on the same Iron Throne and only one can make it. Does that mean everyone who tried was wasting their time?

Movies are a bit different because, though only one can win Best Picture, the others can still make a profit for their studios. Pundits won’t dismiss Mad Max as a failure if it doesn’t take home an Academy Award. In George Miller’s case, it really is an honor to be nominated. But being nominated is an honor that it looks like Jeb Bush, despite all his money and effort, will never experience.

Support The Billfold

The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.