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Universal chairperson Stacey Snider sat down with the THR to wash that DreamWorks nastiness right out of her hair, and in between raving about next year's Miami Vice ("It's got everything: Jamie Foxx, Colin Farrell, rap music, boats, trains, cars, babes.") and discussing the upcoming Munich, gives some insight into the budgeting decisions behind two movies that are dominating much of the industry's year-end discussion:

THR: How do you determine the budget of a movie, whether it's "King Kong," at $207 million, or "Brokeback Mountain," at $14 million?

Snider: It starts from a completely subjective gut check: What do we think this movie can do? Then you go to the research to see if that first gut reaction is supported by the historicals. Then you ask if there's a reason for this movie to exceed the historicals or is there something about the project that would lead it to underperform? We talk with each other, so it's not just one's person's enthusiasm.

Due to space considerations, we won't blockquote Snider's entire response, which included a surprisingly candid admission that "one person's enthusiasm" lead to Brokeback being originally envisioned as a Kong-style, CGI-filled blockbuster. But after early test footage revealed that much of America was not ready for a $200 million gay love story about a 50-foot cowboy and his human companion (their first sexual coupling, while tastefully shot, was ultimately too terrifying) laying waste to an intolerant ranching community, a scaled-back, Oscar-friendly version was rushed into production.