Times when you can FEEL a series' increase in budgets?
It's pretty common for a series of movies or games to get an increase in budget with each new installment. But a lot of the time that budget goes to overhead, marketing, or other things you don't necessarily feel as you experience it.
But good lord can you see *every* extra penny on display as you go through the John Wick movies. It's pretty funny going back to the relatively humble first movie, which famously had to be saved from financial troubles. The opulence of the Russian mob is shown with like... a nice looking penthouse bar, that doesn't even have a bartender on shift when we see it.
You can really see it by comparing the club/concert scenes from 1, 2 and 4. The first one is still really impressive, but the club sets aren't particularly big because they're segmented into a couple of mid-sized rooms, so there aren't that many extras in each one.
The second one is already more impressive with being in a really cool location, a concert in the middle of ruins of Rome. And a lot of the action is set in front of the stage itself, so there's a huge cast of extras that take way too long to notice the gunfight happening in the middle of the crowd.
The series takes a break from those kinds of scenes in 3, but it CLEARLY didn't get out of practice, because the one in 4 at Killa Harkan's night club is absolutely insane. An absolutely enormous crowd of dancers, artificial waterfalls all over the place, pyrotechnics, the works. Apparently filming the final fight scene of John Wick 1 was absolutely miserable because of the decision to shoot it in the rain, so I can't even *imagine* how difficult it must have been for the final part of that scene. Apparently Keanu Reeves actually accidentally hit Scott Adkins for real a couple of times, because the water was in his eyes.
So yeah, any other times you all have FELT the money in something you've experienced?