A Billionaire Tried to Make a Movie. It Was a Disaster.

In the late 2000s, a Chinese billionaire with zero filmmaking experience but a deep obsession with movies (he’d seen over 4,000!) set out to create the next Hollywood style blockbuster - an epic underwater fantasy that the world had never seen before. He gave it a budget of over $100,000,000 but between endless rewrites, changes of directors and complete financial chaos, "Empires of the Deep" turned into one of the biggest filmmaking disasters ever. Special thanks to everyone who was interviewed for this video: Maxx Maulion https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2832013/ Pierre Bourdaud https://www.facebook.com/pierre.bourdaud https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3968703/ Irena Violette https://www.instagram.com/iredivina Pitof https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0685759/ Sam Voutas https://www.samvoutas.com Mitch Moxley https://www.mitch-moxley.com And thanks to Lamborghini Copenhagen for letting me being silly around their nice cars. ___ Some of the sources I used for research include: Sunk, "How a Chinese billionaire’s dream of making an underwater fantasy blockbuster turned into a legendary movie fiasco." - By Mitch Moxley. The Atavist Magazine, No. 58 "What it’s Like Directing a Vanity Film for a Chinese Billionaire", VICE, By Chris Shearer "‘Empires’ has deep Chinese pockets", The Hollywood Reporter, by Jonathan Landreth "In China, an Attempt at a Hollywood-Style Movie", The New York Times, by Edward Wong ___ Official Store ► https://tonisfilmclub.com ___ Toni Vesdream https://www.instagram.com/tonivesdream https://twitter.com/tonivesdream https://letterboxd.com/tonivesdream/ ___ Toni's Film Club IMDb ► https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24178364 Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/tonisfilmclub/ TikTok ► https://www.tiktok.com/@tonisfilmclub ___ Chapters: 0:00 Empires of the Deep: A Billionaire’s Dream 1:21 China’s Film Industry 3:09 Jon Jiang’s Big Hollywood Ambition 4:15 The Early Days of Empires of the Deep 9:35 Filming Empires of the Deep 12:52 The Troubled Production of Empires of the Deep 15:18 Escaping a Film Set 21:46 The Struggle to Finish the Film 24:50 Trying to Release Empires of the Deep 29:31 Was Empires of the Deep Doomed from the Start? ___ Toni's Film Club is all about interesting film history, movies, directing, writing, editing and everything else that goes into this wonderful art form. Oh yeah, and bad jokes. You've been warned. It takes a lot of time to make those videos, so if you enjoyed this one and would like to see more, feel free to subscribe. I appreciate it! https://www.youtube.com/c/TonisFilmClub