A very, very small fortune.
"There's a greater demand for professional language creation services in Hollywood than there's ever been," Peterson explains, "but that still means there's about five jobs a year out there. Furthermore, if you are contacted, you're not just negotiating for your pay; you're defending the job itself. At a certain price point (a point which varies so wildly it can't even be estimated), the producers will decide it's simply not worth it to have a created language at all. You're [essentially] competing against them saying, 'Let's just have them speak English.'"
Competing with human laziness doesn't often end well. Also not helping is the fact that Hollywood deals only in extremes: They only want to hire either the most experienced conlangers or complete amateurs.
"When producers need someone to create a language," Peterson says, "they first look for people they've heard of, but language creators are absolutely unheard of -- unless they've worked on a major production like Avatar or Game Of Thrones. A new job, then, will either go to someone who's already done a huge job (or several), or it will go to someone handy -- likely no one who's ever before considered creating a language ..."
Kim Brunhuber / CBC News
Hint: Only one of those two will wind up reading a book written in their own language.