The Adventures of Baron Munchausen they approached the person again when they were done, he was met with the reply, "I'm not gonna pay you, because I don't want to seem to be doing anything that could benefit Terry Gilliam." "Munchausen" is the third entry in Gilliam's ""Trilogy of Imagination"", preceded by "Time Bandits" (1981) and "Brazil" (1985). All are about the "craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible." Gilliam explains that, "The one theme that runs through all three of these pictures is a consistently serious battle between fantasy and what people perceive as reality."
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen a financial disaster how "It seemed actually appropriate that Munchausen–the greatest liar in the world–should be a victim of some of the greatest liars in the world." He compared the film's budget problems to the even more serious problems of "We're No Angels" that commonly go unmentioned, and he went on to declare its difficulties as a mixture of "trade press" still being upset about Gilliam's battle with Universal over "Brazil", nepotism, and an intrigue on behalf of Ray Stark successfully trying to have Puttnam removed from Columbia, coupled with the fact the studio was being sold at the time: