James Brooks spent $120 million on How Do You Know. I'll let that sink in for a minute. That is a lot of money. No question the salaries involved are pricey, but let's take a look at this trailer again:
These are pretty average-looking clothes and sets, with the exception of Nationals Park, which I have to imagine the Lerners let Brooks use nearly for free for the sheer, giddy fact of the dreadful Washington Nationals being in a major motion picture. To put this in perspective, you could have paid the estimated $50 million in major star salaries it took to make this picture and still have almost enough money left over to make The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. If you'd had the full $120 million, you could've make LXG with slightly more decent CGI and maybe even turned it into a plausible project. In other words, this is just absurdly excessive. I understand that movies are art, and I'm willing to accept that directors should get some latitude to put their art together if they can raise the money. But this ain't Avatar, where James Cameron's developing new technology that will move the genre forward even if the movie itself is a bit of a mess, or a huge ensemble picture. It's just an apparently self-indulgent romantic comedy. And spending $120 million on that in a recession feels more than a little ridiculous.