Music
Metallica is broke
by Josiah Hughes
March 20, 2015
“Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire” — these classic Metallica lyrics now read like a desperate plea. At least, if the band’s biographers are to be believed, the California thrash metal titans are deep in debt.
Longtime Metallica biographers Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood recently gave an interview to The Weeklings magazine, where they revealed that Metallica have been hemorrhaging money in recent years. In fact, they haven’t broken even since at least 2010.
According to the biographers, the band’s Orion festival was “disastrous financially.”
“Factor in HQ staff salaries, crew retainers, and assorted running costs associated with maintaining an entertainment corporation and you can easily understand why the band — of necessity now rather than by choice — are driven to tour Europe every summer,” the writers told the magazine.
Further, their Vancouver-shot 3-d concert film Through the Never was another iffy investment. Not even the adorable, tired-eyed actor Dane Dehaan could save the movie from costing them close to $32 million.
“Through the Never film project was a horrible misjudgment, a misguided attempt to breathe new life into a decade-old idea. As the film spiraled horribly over-budget it’s hard not to imagine that at least one band member — and let’s be honest, we’re talking about James Hetfield here – thinking ‘What the fuck have we got ourselves into?’ Quite how that ‘script’ ever got the green light is an unfathomable mystery.”
Ever optimistic, Lars Ulrich reportedly believes they’ll recoup their losses from t-shirt sales. So make sure you buy lots of Metallica t-shirts if you don’t want these guys living on the streets.
Then again, the members of Metallica have a combined net worth close to half a billion dollars, so they’ll probably be okay even if they make a few more bad investments.
[h/t Consequence of Sound]
