Thinking about modern summer blockbuster movies, it seems like they are often trying to be "bigger and better" than their competition, with budgets for these movies often stated to be well over $100 million dollars, and sometimes more than $200 million dollars. While most of the time it is easy to see that most of the budget for a particular movie was spent on special effects to make the movie look as good as possible, some movies that reportedly had a budget of over $100 million dollars almost look "cheap" when compared to other movies in the same genre with a similar budget. What movies, when looking at the reported budget and similar movies in the same genre, look "cheap" by comparison?

Both GI Joe movies.

Van Helsing
Flash Gordon

Superman Returns has that fantastic scene of Superman catching the plane and literally nothing else. The second best FX in the movie got cut out (the opener from Krypton). Most of the reported budget were sunk costs on prior failed Superman reboots, including $20 million to Nick Cage for doing nothing.

Flash Gordon does look "cheap," but part of it is the style they use too. It's gaudy, over-stylized design does look slightly artificial, arguably deliberately anyway. Also, as much as I liked the movie, some of the latest X-Men movie couldn't help but look sound stagey in a lot of places. I'd say it was a major problem with the last Indiana Jones flick too. Then again, I think that sometimes higher budget movies tend to have such expensive looking sound stages that they look expensive, but take.

Waterworld in 1995 had a budget of $172 million. I wasn't impressed with the effects.

XXX : State of the Union.

The Matrix Reloaded

Most big budget movies from the mid to late 90s, with their dated CGI effects. Waterworld and Wild Wild West are probably the worst offenders with budgets of over 170 million each. Good call on Van Helsing, too.

Batman & Robin - Even taking away from the shit script, the production and costume designs looked cheap. Heck I might even add Batman Returns in terms of the sets.

That scene in particular with all of the Agent Smiths looked absolutely horrendous in 2003. I haven't watched it in awhile but I imagine it looks even worse now.

IMDB states Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull cost $185 million which surprises me considering many of the exterior shots used such tight camera angles I would have assumed they were shot in Spielberg's backyard. The rest of the exterior shots were terrible cartoony CGI.

I think the Thor movies look cheap.

I think its funny how its most modern films that look cheap, whereas older movies with smaller budgets look more authentic.

I think it's because of the use of sound stages and green screen to replace entire sequences instead of just a few quick shots.

Though City of Lost Children looks expensive as hell to this day, and that had an $18m budget in 1995. Similarly Dark City had a $27m budget and looked more expensive than that as well.

Shooting on actual water is overwhelmingly expensive, which is why Hollywood now prefers to use CGI for it.

Superman: The Motion Picture's budget was reportedly $55M back in 1977 when it was filmed.

The estimated budget for today considering inflation in close to $200M.

It does look cheap for 2014 standards for that kind of money.

This is the first movie that came to my mind. I've come around on Crystal Skull since its disappointing premier and now enjoy the movie for what it is, but each time I watch it, I'm struck by how tiny it looks compared to the expansive canvas employed by the other three movies in the series.

Additionally I remember hearing stories during production of the large atoll in the movie constantly sinking and having to be raised over and over. I also remember hearing that days of filming were lost throughout the shoot while crews towed the atoll in circles so they could film the different angles with no land in the background.

First one that came to mind for me as well.

the new Hercules movie by Renny Harlin.

70 million flick and it looks like it was shot for about 20, give or take.

A Sound of Thunder cost like 80 million dollars and looks like a Sci Fi Original.

Green Lantern looked pretty chintzy to me.

I've always thought the special effects in Apollo 13 looked hella fake.

Days of Future Past. The first Wolverine/Beast fight, and Mystique's first action scene (also the Amazing Spidey 2 kicker) look like they were shot on cheap digital cameras then converted. The kind you'd expect to see in a direct to dvd actioner.