The Village was a great idea and a movie that doesn't quite live up to its promise. It obviously would have been a bad one, though, without M. Night Shyamalan's unsettling gifts and its outstanding cast. His strengths and weaknesses separated for the first time, and to this day it's like a map of the things he can do and the things he can't—things that would become obvious in the next few flicks. But you know what, when he made The Village, M. Night got paid [PDF]. (via Hacker News)
The PDF outlines where the money went, from the highest producer ($3m!) to the lowliest production staff. As writer, director and intellectual proprietor of the story, Shyalaman hauled in about $12m. It's a fascinating breakdown of the side of Hollywood accounting that gets reported to the government (larger numbers) than the one that gets reported to people expecting royalties and residuals (lower numbers).
More from Wikipedia:
The film was originally titled The Woods, but the name was changed because a film in production by director Lucky McKee, The Woods (2006), already had that title. Like other Shyamalan productions, this film had high levels of secrecy surrounding it, to protect the expected twist ending that became a Shyamalan trademark. Despite that, the script was stolen over a year before the film was released, prompting many "pre-reviews" of the film on several Internet film sites and much fan speculation about plot details. The village set in the film was built in its entirety in one field outside Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. An adjacent field contained an on-location temporary sound stage. Production on the film started in October 2003, with delays because some scenes needing fall foliage could not be shot because of a late fall season. Principal photography was wrapped up in mid-December of that year. In April and May 2004, several of the lead actors were called back to the set. Reports noted that this seemed to have something to do with a change to the film's ending, and, in fact, the film's final ending differs from the ending in a stolen version of the script that surfaced a year earlier; the script version ends after Ivy climbs over the wall and gets help from a truck driver, while the film version has Ivy meeting a park ranger and scenes where she returns to the village.
I remember thinking the movie deflated completely after that point, so I wonder why they decided to add the extra scenes. The only reason to continue the movie after that point was if there was going to be another twist (Imagine the blind girl returning with the medicine to the village to find it a bloody mess and everyone dead, because it turns out the monsters are real) or if someone is forcing you to conform the structure to that of a blockbuster's last act. All you get, as I recall, is pointless stuff outside the fence and William Hurt exhaustively, tediously explaining the movie to you.
