Don’t have the $20 million required to have Johnny Depp star in your $40 million budget film? How about $1 million then? For that price you can have him for a week. The name of the practice is called ‘boarding’ and it is being used more and more frequently to cut costs in the film industry.

Hollywood is trying keep the sky-high costs of having an A-lister in their feature in check, by making use of boarding. Basically an actor or actress would drop by the set for a few weeks or even days, have all their scenes filmed in this short period, and leave. This practice allows their reps to maintain that their normal quote is still intact.

Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger boarded ‘The Expendables 2’ for extended cameo roles. Willis receives $1 million a day for boarding and won’t budge for anything lower. Even though he appeared for now more than a few minutes on screen, he was used as a poster-boy for the film’s marketing. Another upside to boarding is it allows the actors more free time to spend on lower-budget films that they care about.

The one problem with boarding is that it creates a logistics nightmare. It has directors and producers jumping through hoops just to try and get all the shots needed with the A-lister.

But you get what you pay for, eh?

[ Source : HollywoodReporter ]