His vision for the film was not casual and was not uninformed. He understood, from his zoo experience and from the sustained period of cohabitation with large cats that preceded the production, that lions were not manageable in the way that studio-trained animals were manageable — that the project he was proposing was genuinely unprecedented in its scope and its risk. He appears to have believed, and to have persuaded enough investors to believe, that this genuine risk was the specific source of value in the film: that audiences would be able to see the difference between real lions in a real setting and manufactured spectacle.
The investors who initially backed the project — Japanese and British funders — provided early capital that got the production underway. As the production extended beyond its planned timeline and its planned budget, those investors withdrew, and Marshall funded the continuing production through the sale of real property. Hedren has said in interviews that the family sold four houses over the course of the production. The film that cost seventeen million dollars started at three million, and the gap between those numbers represents not studio money or investor capital but the personal assets of the family that made it.
This is the financial architecture of the Roar project: a man with specific ambition, specific professional credibility, and specific personal financial resources committed those resources so completely to a single creative project that the project consumed them. The film’s commercial failure — worldwide gross under two million dollars against seventeen million dollars in costs — was not merely a professional disappointment. It was a financial catastrophe for the family that had funded it with their own property.