FYI, USA Today has a nice little puff piece on the subject of insuring movie-making. A sample:
For last year’s The Bourne Ultimatum, Fireman’s Fund wrote a policy that considered potential medical problems at location shots in London; Madrid; Tangier, Morocco; Paris; and Riga, Latvia; as well as the chance that airport X-ray machines might damage negatives of the film.
And Into the Wild didn’t involve just any bear.
“It was Bart the Bear. He’s famous: In every bear movie you’ve ever seen, if the bear is trained, it’s Bart,” says the film’s insurance broker, Christie Mattull, senior vice president of the DeWitt Stern Group.
“When an animal is trained, then it’s more expensive to insure,” she adds. “If you have a bear from the zoo, he’s worth whatever a bear costs, maybe $5,000. But if a bear’s trained to dance and pretend to attack on command, then he’s worth $250,000.”[...]
But that was nothing compared with what had to be done for the 2002 flick K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford.
“We actually got a Russian nuclear submarine,” Mattull says. “That submarine had to be towed from Florida to Nova Scotia for filming, and we had to insure that — it couldn’t move under its own power — and make sure the tugboats wouldn’t be sucked down if the submarine sank.”