The budget, as it turns out, didn’t need to be quite so high. As detailed in a 2020 retrospective in Forbes, if the filmmakers found a way to film the “Easy Street” number correctly the first time, they could have saved a million dollars.

The plot of the movie involves Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett), the wicked headmistress of Annie’s orphanage, attempting to swindle reward money out of Daddy Warbucks (Albert Finney). Annie carries half of a locket and explains that her long-lost parents — whom she believes are still alive — will someday return with the other half. Daddy Warbucks, sympathetic to Annie’s dream, offers a $50,000 reward to Annie’s biological folks. Miss Hannigan, by coincidence, ends up finding the other half of the locket herself and hatches a scheme with her brother (Tim Curry) and his girlfriend (Bernadette Peters) to have them pose as Annie’s parents and collect the reward. When they find the locket, they sing a number called “Easy Street.” 

In the original rendition of the song, the three villains danced out into the street. This, Burnett felt, was very much in the wrong spirit. She said: 

“In original Broadway show, it was just the three villains in the orphanage who sang Easy Street. This being Hollywood, they wanted to open it up and make it this huge musical extravaganza, and we went out on the street itself and danced and sang and ran up and down fire escapes, and there was even an organ grinder with a monkey. That had nothing to do with the fact that we’re going to be on Easy Street. We found that half of a locket that belonged to Annie’s parents, and then suddenly, the plot went out of the window. It was total overkill.”