Never bet on breaking records: Why I wouldn't have greenlit Guillermo Del Toro's R-rated, $150m version of HP Lovecraft's At the Mountain of Madness.

Let's be honest for a second. Under normal circumstances, Inception likely would not have been greenlit in its current form at Warner Bros. While Warner Bros. until recently had a reputation for giving lots of money to notable filmmakers and more-or-less staying out of their way, even they had their limits. Had Christopher Nolan not just delivered a $1 billion-grossing and critically-acclaimed superhero sequel, and had not Warner Bros. desperately wanted to guarantee that Nolan would return for what would become The Dark Knight Rises, Inception would have been a very different movie, if it even would have existed at all. On paper, would you green-light a $200 million science-fiction film based on an original screenplay that was full of complex ideas, difficult-to-explain story elements and a distinct lack of bright colors and conventional sex appeal? There are but a handful of filmmakers who could have made Inception as it was. Chris Nolan, coming off The Dark Knight, was one of them. Other than perhaps James Cameron and Steven Spielberg (George Lucas would have just funded the thing out of his own back-pocket), I cannot think of anyone else who could have gotten the greenlight without severely slashing the budget. Guillermo del Toro isn't one of those directors either.