As such, when a studio is certain that it wants multiple new entries in a series, it ’ll often attempt to roll the productions together. Nevertheless, it remains more cost-effective to retain cast, crew, costumes, sets, and props for multiple films if they’re filmed either concurrently or back-to-back. This incensed the cast and crew, as they were only paid for a single production, and since then, talent contracts have been specifically worded to prevent producers from cobbling together additional movies from the footage of what was intended as one film without proper compensation.
To double their return on investment, they cut the movie in half at its planned intermission and released it as two separate films, The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers a year later. A brief history of the back-to-back film sequel Warner Bros.īack in 1973, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind determined that their adaptation of The Three Musketeers might not be profitable as a single, three-hour film.
