A while ago it said the budget was something like 165mil but now it it says 210mil what happened? Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) - Box Office Mojo
I have no idea... maybe they were bullshitting us about the lower cost? Maybe their were additional costs (Remember that lawsuit for some reason) - no idea...
The reported budget for movies is often all over the place. Avatar's estimated budget ranges from 250-400 mill depending which source you use. Others have the same discrepancies but don't feel like listing them all. It's not unusual or surprising for the budget to exceed earlier reports.
Studios will do almost anything to keep from revealing what the actual budget was for a film. They cover up the marketing cost. They never talk about the number of tickets sold so it looks like films are more popular than a report on ticket sells would indicate. It takes a bit of digging for places to make an estimate of what the budget of any given film was. As more information is uncovered the budget numbers can change. Hollywood loves that image of money just flows like wine but the profit margins for studios isn't as rosy as they would have you think.
I'd bet money the $165m was just misreporting that people ran with. Once it became clear how much CGI was in this thing, $165m was obviously too low a figure.
Yeah, budget stuff is always misreported, because it changes all the time. Unavoidable schedule changes alone can add millions mid-filming.
Flying a bunch of equipment and people to China probably ate up a lot of money. The whole cast was in China, do you know how much money was spent on fancy hotels?
