Jim Carrey turned down $10 million to play The Mask again. So the studio spent $84 million making the sequel without him and built the whole thing around a baby. To understand how bad that went, you need to know how good the first one was. Carrey signed on to The Mask for $450,000, before he was a movie star. Then Ace Ventura came out, he blew up, and The Mask made $351 million worldwide on a $23 million budget. New Line basically won the lottery. Of course they wanted a sequel. They offered him $10 million, and he told Barbara Walters in 1995 he had no interest in playing the same guy twice. So the project sat around for years. When New Line finally made it, they went with Jamie Kennedy, a baby born with the mask's powers, and a budget reported somewhere between $84 and $100 million. That's around four times what the original cost. What you're watching is a camcorder bootleg from one of those theaters in 2005. It opened to $7.5 million on almost 3,000 screens. The first movie opened to $23 million more than ten years earlier, back when tickets were a lot cheaper. Son of the Mask ended up with $17 million in the US and about $60 million worldwide, and it took home the Razzie for worst sequel. A movie that risky only gets greenlit when somebody else is carrying the risk, and that's what happened here. New Line reportedly covered a big chunk of the budget before cameras rolled by selling the foreign rights ahead of time. Distributors overseas paid for a movie called The Mask, and nobody seemed to ask who'd be wearing it. New Line's own exposure reportedly came down to around $20 million, and a lot of those overseas buyers got stuck with the loss. Studios keep making sequels like this because the title is the one thing they actually own, so it's tempting to believe that's what people paid for. The Mask got an Oscar nomination for visual effects. Half the time, the most cartoonish thing on screen was just Carrey's actual face. A couple of years ago Carrey said he'd put the mask back on if somebody brought him the right idea. I promise you the number isn't $10 million anymore.