The poison is in the dosage.
A few days of reshoots:
"Let's improve the jump-scare when Richard Dreyfuss is finding the shark tooth in the hull of the fishing boat."
A few months of reshoots:
"The audience didn't like watching Fleabag embarrassing Indiana Jones for 2 hours. We have to start over on the movie."
Yeah, it depends. Reshoots are common and always have been, because no matter how well you prepare and how carefully you shoot, the editing room will always surprise you. And the whole point of test screenings is to spot problems for potential recuts or reshoots.
In the case of the Jaws shoot mentioned by Batguy, that was done in the editor's backyard pool.
And the bigger the budget, the likelier it is there will be extensive reshoots. Because studios today fall for the sunk cost fallacy every time. Batgirl was the exception, not the rule. But it wasn't always that way.
There was a time when studios murdered movies in their cribs all the time.
I was on a picture long ago that got shut down by Paramount two weeks into production, because of another picture that was out of control. Our picture was called Arrive Alive, and we were shooting in South and Central Florida.
Unfortunately (for us), Days of Thunder was also shooting in Florida (Daytona), and it was wildly overbudget and behind schedule, and still shooting with its release date inexorably closing in.
On our show, Paramount watched dailies for two weeks and concluded that Willem Dafoe wasn't funny. So they fired him and recast Martin Short. And our director, who had already spent our entire $13M budget in preproduction, walked off the movie because he didn't want to work with Short. So we had no star and no director.
So Paramount shut us down rather than have a second out-of-control disaster unfold in Florida. We were all devastated, but after 35 years of hindsight, I realize Paramount made the sensible move there.
Studios today should do more pulling the plug on Arrive Alive and Batgirl and less releasing Snow White no matter what.
