I love me some Robert Rodriguez. As a young Latino film geek, I looked up to the dude and his kinetic and fast-paced filmmaking style. With other filmmakers out there, you got the sense that they had settled into the Hollywood way of relying on a crew, but with Rodriguez, you got the impression that he was basically a kid in the candy store, allowing his creative juices to flow in the same way I did in high school.

Of course, a lot of this was because Rodriguez was a reliable filmmaker. He’d make films for cheap, turn them around on time, and they’d make back their budgets easily. His track record allowed him to pretty much treat every film as a big pet project, allowing films like Sin City to look like it cost well over $40 million to make when they didn’t.

While Rodriguez’s next picture, Alita: Battle Angel, is set to be his most expensive enterprise yet, don’t think he’ll be leaving his style COMPLETELY at the door. Sure, Rodriguez stated previously that he worked to make a film producer James Cameron could think he shot himself, but he still managed to pull back the budget and schedule.

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“[James Cameron] said it’d probably be twice or three times as much if he did it (Laughs),” Rodriguez revealed to LRM during a roundtable at New York Comic- Con. “So I did it very economically. Shot it in 60 days. I do my normal fast sort of thing. But then the effects … It’s all Weta effects and their mind-blowing.”

So what’s the actual budget on this thing? Given the overall effects and the shots that we’ve seen, it can’t be cheap, right? Not at all.

“It’s in the $150 million range,” Rodriguez said.

It’s about what we expected it would be — though a bit short on the estimated $175 million and $200 million we’ve heard in the past. Given that Cameron is giving it such high praise in regards to its look, I can’t wait to see how it all turns out. Rodriguez has never created a film on this level before and I’m very interested to see when you mesh his trademark guerrilla style with a massive budget.

What do you think of Rodriguez’s comments? Does the film look to be a James Cameron-caliber in terms of VFX? Let us know down below!

Alita: Battle Angel hits theaters on February 14, 2019.

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SOURCE: LRM Online