That's wasteful. I hope someone can prove him wrong by doing it in CGI.
And to be a movie prop it doesn't need to even have all the parts for airworthiness, it could practically be an empty hull with broken engines and you wouldn't see a difference.
Of course someone else could tell the same story cheaper. Anyone with a smartphone can make a movie. The cheapest production cost generally isn't what people value in art and entertainment.
Oh well.
Jokes aside, I wonder how much one of those decommissioned planes costs. Maybe disposing off a decommissioned plane is the hardest job and nobody cares about stripping out parts — in either case I’m very curious about the actual costs.
A practical advantage of CGI is that you can tweak it and redo till you get it right, whereas in the real scenario you have one take so you better make it count. But I don’t know if we should even seriously discuss a comparison; in all probability it’s more of a PR stunt. (Maybe one good enough to be worth spending a substantial fraction of the marketing budget!)
Also, this sentence a couple of paragraphs down:
> Though buying a 747 plane and blowing it up may have been more efficient, Christopher Nolan later seems to insinuate that it may not have been the cheaper option
seems to muddle the waters somewhat.
More seriously, is the metal on an old airframe of high quality? I'd wonder whether the accumulated decades of wear and weathering might make it hard to recycle for anything like another airplane. But this isn't my field, so I'm just guessing.
I could easily see them spending more on that than the scrap value of the plane. But presumably the stunt coordination itself is also expensive.
Movie "explosions" don't usually actually explode things, that would be dangerous to the crew. They just make pretty flames, and use air cannons to send stuff flying in controlled ways.