Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Never have I seen a great big budget movie flop in the theaters. All the so-called good big budget movies that flopped in theaters have a similar problem. They are either poorly paced or their level of sophistication is merely a work of an imitator and not an original. However I can't explain the contrary as to why some poorly paced movies are hits. But as much as people say it is a very tight rope walk to make a big budget original movie that is also a hit, the problem is never when the movie is great. It's always when the movie doesn't have common sense in understanding the expectations of audience. By big budget I mean 80 million +

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I’m not sure what the actual substance of this statement is, since it seems to be entirely backwards looking. If it made money it was great, but if it didn’t it must not have been? Also, what conclusion is being drawn and why is it meaningful?

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

This went over my head!!

no..what i meant was...if someone truly makes a great big budget movie then it will be a hit. So people can't complain that certain big budget movie flopped because those movies aren't good enough to be hits.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Okay, but how is this statement supported? As I noted, it's backwards-looking. It seems like an example of the No True Scotsman fallacy, where you advance a definition of a thing, but any contrary examples will be excluded from it. How would you test this claim, except by saying, any time someone advanced a seemingly great movie "well, I guess it wasn't great, because if it was it would've been a hit"?

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

So the more money a big budget film makes, the better it is? No thank you. For example, Pacific Rim (the first one, not the second) was a great big budget action film, and more than good enough to be a huge hit, and yet it flopped. I struggle to see the logic.

what I am saying is something of rule to look into any big budget movie that flops. People often say, blade runner 2049 was too good to flop. But that's not true. I didn't deserve to be a hit. We are okay if a terrible big budget movie like jupiter ascending or valerian flops because it is bad and people don't want to watch it. But it is movies like blade runner 2049 that create this illusion that great big budget movies flop and it's simply not true. Because that movie lacks common sense regarding what is needed in a big budget movie. Same is true for master and commander or miami vice.

Pacific rim should have asked a simple question before being greenlit - "Is the monsters in this movie too similar to godzilla". If they knew the answer to that question then either they would have cut back on the budget or not make the movie at all. There is often a mistake in these movies that people don't find out. For example, casting someone like john david washington(a relative newcomer) in a movie like Tenet is more commercially profitable than casting someone like Jake gyllenhaal(with his baggage of flops/mediocre movies) because no matter how big a director is Nolan, audience will look at it as Jake gyllenhaal movie and not Nolan movie. Maybe not all of them but significant portion of them to make a difference in box office. Same can be said about a movie like first man. After getting cerebral epics like interstellar and gravity and fun space movies like martian, how can you expect audience to go to a space movie that is anything but wondrous ? i can get a sappy family drama in any genre. I don't want to go to a space movie to feel sad about life.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I keep visiting this thread to see if it eventually arrows into something resembling clarity, and I continue to be disappointed haha

What is the common sense that Blade Runner 2049 lacks?

This is really just repeating the initial claim. I don't think it addresses any of the questions I asked:

Citizen Kane/Thread

now that you have visited this thread..you can suggest a name that resembles clarity.

Reg. your question, It's common sense knowledge that blade runner 1 flopped hard. How can you expect to make a sequel for insane budget and expect to turn in profit ? online buzz alone can't make a movie hit. The pacing of the movie is horrible and R-rating ? are you kidding me ? R-rating on a movie at that budget ? It is either made so that one of the investors need not file for taxes by showing losses on this movie or everyone involved in the movie especially Denis lacks commercial common sense in filmmaking.

are you really asking me to compare transformers 4 with master and commander or blade runner 2049 ? Transformers or many of the garbage pre existing IP movies are made solely to make money with no intention of artistic excellence. So they make sure that the IP is extremely popular and recognizable to the demo they target to come to the movies.

But that doesn't mean artistic movies at that scale shouldn't have commercial sense. They should and movies like blade runner 2049 lacked the commercial sense even in its quality.

Er, no? I'm asking you the questions I asked you. I have no idea how you've mutated it into this.

Blade Runner flopped because of market saturation, it was the dawn of the multi-plex and studios were trying to find the next Jaws.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I'm trying to understand this thread, I really am...... but I just don't.

A great movie is great and will make great money and therefore will not flop. And if a great movie flopped then it's just not a great movie.

That's what I got out of it (which makes no sense overall)

My take is that it's just a normal subjective opinion being dressed up as some kind of objective principle. That seems to be the case with most of these threads, most of which are strangely preoccupied with box office and trying to find some sort of alchemy with which to convert it into a quantifiable measure of quality. They usually project this preoccupation onto all creative professionals, too.

He means the new one, Blade Runner 2049.

Was saying you were


https://media0.giphy.com/media/KziKC...jaUF/giphy.gif

If this is your philosophy then this thread is not for you. Which is okay.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Ah, I didn't realize he shifted to talking about the first.

Not sure why minor errors are always treated as occasions to attempt a full-on dunk, but my mistake.

It's the logic itself which is being questioned, so I'm not sure this works as a response (even though it would otherwise be a mature/admirable one).

As I've noted a couple of times, the logic of "real blockbusters never fail, therefore things that have failed were not real blockbusters" is backwards-facing, and appears to have no real predictive power. It's a definition that achieves purity only by excluding all seeming exceptions. You can always find a reason a film flopped after the fact. That's easy. The ones that didn't have reasons you could point to, as well, if only they had.

I thought it was yours?

And who is this thread for anyway? I haven't seen a single person who seems to understand what it is you're trying to say.

The counter example to blade runner 2049 is 1917. It is a movie that is well aware of the stakes. Its budget is 100 million and it has no stars. So the movie relied on oscar buzz and technical gimmicks based marketing . Universal studios is well aware of this. It is a movie that almost repeated the success formula of the revenant, which everyone thought was only because of leonardo dicaprio(here we go again haha) to everyone's surprise. I am sure universal went over the script 100s of time to make sure that it is academy type movie.
Now that's a movie that is okay/good/great but definitely not a bad movie depending on personal taste that is well thought out from a commercial angle and artistic angle before making and therefore its a hit. Blade runner 2049 is irresponsible in all fronts....from the pacing of the movie all the way to the budget.

So BR 2049 should have done a prestige franchise sequel equivalent to what 1917 did for a prestige oscar-bait war movie.

thats for me to decide

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I really don't think you're listening to these questions. I'm not asking for counter-examples, because those are backwards-looking, too. That's the problem, as I described a couple of times earlier in the thread. Here are the questions I've been asking from the beginning:

You're advancing a principle which does not make testable claims, it only retroactively describes things, and it does so by finding reasons why each seeming counterexample doesn't actually count. In statistics, this is called "overfitting."

You're not the only one.

It’s for you to decide who this public thread on a public forum is for? So is there like a survey we have to fill first somewhere or are we going by trial by combat maybe?

But whatever you say, American Psycho. I’ll let you rule your little thread of inconsistent nonsense then! :up:

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

You can tell this is a good OP because people are responding to it.

so according to you we should just accept that BR 2049 bombing at the theaters is a travesty and original movies made for 100+ million can bomb no matter how good they are?

No, and literally nothing I said implies this, either. You sound like you're actively avoiding the questions, at this point.

The phrasing here is weird, too. "We should just accept..."? As if the idea of a blockbuster that takes chances is some kind of personal affront? Seems like there's some discomfort with the idea that good films can do badly, too. I'm not gonna say the world's general unpredictability isn't unsettling, but we can't theorycraft it out of existence.

Regardless, if you want anyone to take these theories at all seriously, you'll need to answer the occasional question about their logic and implications. I'm presenting you with some really simple follow-ups, and all I'm getting back are weird non-sequitur contradictions about things I didn't say or ask.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I'm reading along.
From the title, you state that great, big-budget movies never flop in theaters. I assume you mean that if the movie is great, then it will never flop. Therefore, if it is bad then it will flop. Therefore, if a big-budget movie flops, it is by definition bad.

To clarify this, do you mean to say that a big-budget movie flopped because it was bad? Or that a big-budget movie must be labelled as bad because it was unsuccessful financially in the theater release, even though the movie might have actually been a good one?

Can you define good? You referenced 1917 earlier up and I read that to suggest that 1917 was good (or at least, not bad) because development was approached from a commercial point of view (assuming that, at least). Does this mean that "commercial" is good inherently (Transformers)? Does good "artistically" fit into that? Or must artistic success also include commercial success, leaving the primary standard of good to be its commercial success?


=\

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I read the two pages since my post. And I am still



https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/10...x2-940x627.png




All I get is "big budget", "good" and "flop". Kudos to Yoda to at least try to make sense of it!

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I'm trying to find better examples than BR2049 but I'm struggling.....

Polar Express
Ali
....

Anything on these aronis?

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

BTW, someone bumped a similar thread about Jake Gyllenhaal recently, and I came across some old posts there that are essentially identical to the ideas here, where aronisred decides they just don't have the "screen presence" or "star power" to be in blockbusters. I said this, which I think works well as a response here, a couple years later:

This seems to be the unifying theme of all these threads: odd preoccupation with box office, an unexamined assumption that everybody is only interested in maximizing it, and the inevitability that when we unpack the empirical-sounding claims, they just turn out to be normal subjective opinions.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Link please... I am bored in this lockdown! :D

@aronisred


Come back and respond for a few.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Does The Last Airbender count as a big budget movie that flopped? Or does it not count as a flop cause it made double it's budget back?

It does not count.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I can't find any financials for 'Still Waiting' but it's definitely not big budget haha Loved the original 'Waiting' though

last airbender is neither a good movie nor was it a giant hit. So it doesn't apply

For me polar express is not a good movie but speaking of Ali...yes its a giant bomb but it is also an incredibly irresponsible movie. Thats a movie that shouldnt even take 40 million to make but somehow michael mann found a way to make it for close to 100 million and the movie really isnt great. Its a decent biopic jacked up by the giant budget.

The only take away from this topic is that studios don't know which big budget prestige films to greenlit. They should look at the director and his track record and see if he can make something much more than just a good movie. If a director makes 4-5 good movies straight doesnt mean he can make a 150 million$ movie a hit. Even if it's good..it takes that extra spice in filmmaking skills to make it a blockbuster.

These theories are not just about end products..they are about studios making movies quickly even with good directors. They see potential and want to make them the next james cameron or chris nolan to make money. Thats how you end up with irresponsible movies that really dont warrant the budget and praise.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

The idea that the people actually risking hundreds of millions of dollars are missing some obvious thing that you, a random dude on the Internet has totally figured out, is kinda absurd on its face, man. It's easy to determine what will succeed afterwards, but there are enough variables in every production that you can always find a reason either way. The test is whether it's predictive. As I keep pointing out.

Anyway, if you're going to quote all my questions and points, you should respond to them, rather than repeating your initial claim. That seems to be all that ever happens in these threads.

How do you know this? What intimate knowledge of the production process do you have to come to this conclusion?

It'd cost a lot less now, but that was 16 years ago and the technology was new.

In fairness, $20m of that was for Will Smith alone - going with your suggested $40m budget, I'm not sure how much of a prestige movie you can really make on the remaining $20m (especially if we're talking about a period piece like Ali). A film's production budget has to cover a wide variety of aspects, after all.

I thought it was that great big-budget movies never flop in theatres, which is only really saved from being proved factually incorrect by the idea that greatness is subjective. Otherwise, the idea that studios can't automatically determine what to greenlight in order to achieve commercial and/or critical success is...not exactly news to the rest of us, to say nothing of choosing directors.

how were they able to make raging bull for a lot less money back in the day ? there is always a way...you are saying like there has never been a sports biopic made ever in the history until ali...even top gun and independence day were cheaper than ali. Thats nuts.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

john carter by disney was a major flop or rip department also was a flop

The Lack of understanding of the notion of greatness is also a big problem not just by studios but also by non-casual audience. Greatness is not just in having a good movie with strong emotional core..it is about the ability to connect the story with audience from different demographics...you should be able to appeal to different age groups and different tastes...you should be able to appeal to audience with short attention span that watch transformers movies or marvel movies as well to audience who can watch slow burn movies. Story concept should be simple and fresh enough to appeal to everyone and also fastly paced to get that adrenaline rush.

When you are spending 100-200 millions on an original movie then every single shot in the movie matters. Of course in broad strokes this info seems trivial but a deeper look at this will reveal new information to critique movies.

I know that...you have to be a new kind of crazy to think that I would assume that i have more knowledge or information as to which movies to greenlit than people whose job is to do that. But that doesnt mean there is no such thing called quarterly earnings. To make money you have to make movies when it comes to studios. That sometimes speeds up their process. Ideal goal for a studio is to be in the oscars and make a boat load of money. That can't be achieved by michael bay or MCU movies...so they turn to these acclaimed but blockbuster wise unproven directors and end up with giant bombs like blade runner 2049 or ali.

What exactly is your question...state it in a simple manner..i may have missed it.

Let me see if I'm reading this right - the problem is that the greatness of a movie is primarily determined by its ability to appeal to vastly different demographics with vastly different tastes in movies? That doesn't sound like it guarantees a great movie so much as a compromised one that is not certain to achieve its goals because it's trying to please everyone (especially if it is supposed to appeal to the audience for slow-burn movies but also maintain a fast adrenaline-rush pace at the same time, for example). That can just as easily come across as a lack of focus and wreck a movie's chance at financial success. Even if a movie succeeds by being the type of wholly conventional four-quadrant blockbuster that makes a billion worldwide, that doesn't necessarily make it a great movie. Just because you can easily quantify a movie's box office doesn't automatically make it the most useful means of determining its greatness.

Because the blockbuster, Raging Bull, was not only cheap, but it satisfies all audiences of different ages and demographics. Obviously.

The Chinese didn't like it though, but then they aren't overly keen on raging bulls in general on principle.

That's a great question. One you don't have the answer to.

I can provide part of the answer, though: inflation alone means that the exact same film shot in 2001 instead of 1980 would cost about twice as much.

Also, as others have pointed out: Will Smith.

But really, it's just inherently facile to say "here's another film in the same genre that cost less, therefore anything which costs more was pointless waste." There's so many unwarranted assumptions embedded in that claim I barely know where to start.

there are so many unwarranted assumptions in your rebuttal as well...you assume that inflation played a role. You assume that will smith took a lot of that money when in fact in an instagram video he did say that michael mann took all that money and put it on the screen.

But inflation actually exists and it is a factor just by the fact it exists. It is not an assumption based on personal feelings. It's a measure of tactic used to draw a conclusion. Prices are higher (at least part) due to inflation; or, prices are higher only because I connect arbitrary dots, after the fact, that prove my opinion. An opinion, btw, that is still unclear and changes focus every few posts.


What's the point of doing this? Honest question.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Bottom line define "Great". For some Stalker is great. For some it might be a real snooze-fest. You you would be hard pressed to find a movie that appeals to nearly 100% of movie viewers, even a 90% consensus is difficult. I am curious too see you list five 100M+ movies that you think are great. Probably that way we can understand the objective of this thread a little better.

No...great movies are not the movies made in a vacuum that the filmmaker and 10 other critics love and put it on their top 10 lists. Paul thomas anderson more than any other director is guilty of that. His movies are the ones everyone will see on the top 10 lists but will never bother to check them out. By greatness I mean, its the ability to tell great stories that also appeal to widest audiences possible. The more personal an original movie gets the more people will understand it. But at the same time you can't forget that a movie is entertainment and should be thrilling.

but you dont know that inflation is the only reason the movie budget is 90-100 million $. Thats an assumption.

I'm glad we agree. I'm not sure how to reconcile this with the other posts, though, where you seem to suggest all the flops were obviously going to be flops.

I think you'll find nobody has disputed the existence of quarterly earnings, nor the idea that studios would like to make money. But it turns out making money in creative endeavors can be tricky and unpredictable!

Sure, but sometimes risks work. Peter Jackson hadn't ever taken on anything of the scale of The Lord of the Rings. He made schlocky horror films, a true story drama about mentally disturbed teenage girls, and a box office disappointment in The Frighteners. On paper, this sure seems like a bad idea according to what you're saying, no? But they gave him a couple hundred million dollars and let him film three blockbusters all at once, and they made billions.

BTW, before their Marvel films the Russo brothers worked on quirky meta comedies like Community and Happy Endings. That worked out. Taika Waititi hadn't done anything huge before Thor: Ragnarok. Christopher Nolan's jump from Memento to Batman Begins was a risk, too. These are just off the top of my head.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. It's hard to know which it will be, and it's easy to come up with reasons it was going to in retrospect.

This, basically:

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Punch, Drunk, Love, There Will Be Blood, Magnolia, Master, the Phantom Thread. The dude can practically retire and everyone will still rave about him.

I promise you there are zero.

Er, no, it's a literal fact. Are you familiar with inflation? Google it if not. It is not a potential factor, it's unavoidable. Everything cost more in 2001 than it did in 1980. They literally have an index to measure it called the Consumer Price Index (or CPI). You can find calculators online. I used one before writing my reply.

I assume nothing other than that Will Smith probably got paid a lot more than Robert De Niro did. That's it. There are tons of factors, though, like shooting on location in Mozambique. There are a million reasons one movie costs more than another.

But yeah, news flash: sometimes a film is so well made or so strong creatively that it can be way better than movies that cost more. This doesn't really relate to the discussion about blockbusters, though, because it's hard to know when and how that'll happen.

Here's what I actually said:

I think my personal goal in life is to one day have the level of patience that Yoda has.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

I only wish I get Brad Pitt's long flowing locks back. But alas age, smoking and whiskey, it's never gonna happen! :(

I typed "at least in part" in parentheses to give it attention.

What about the rest of the post? Or all the other posts asking you to clarify things?

Do you actually read the responses or are you making things up as you go?

Film is an art form - just because it's largely used to create light entertainment doesn't mean that that's all it can be and that the only way for a piece to achieve greatness is by conforming to a narrow set of popularity-based parameters. That's without mentioning the baseless assumptions like how "the more personal an original movie gets the more people will understand it" and how they end up contradicting ideas like how a film "should be thrilling". Stalker doesn't stop being a great movie just because it's only talked about by cinephiles and Jurassic World doesn't start being a great movie just because it made a billion dollars at the box office - but then again, I already said as much in the rest of that post that you quoted:

Neither dark knight nor inception is any less than any of the paul thomas anderson movies or any best picture winner in the last 2 decades. In fact in some cases the inverse is true. You can't expect a studio to spend 80 million to make a movie like phantom thread or boogie nights but Paul thomas anderson should be smart to be able to make a movie that should justify that budget. Otherwise his movies should be fit for an independent spirit awards and not oscars.

You are again making the same mistake of combining dumb movies like transformers or fast furious with movies like inception or terminator 2 or gladiator. Both are different. Movies like transformers are needed for film industry to make money but the film industry should focus more on greenlighting movies like interstellar or dunkirk or inception or ford v ferrari or wolf of wall street etc...to spend the money they made from those movies and not movies like phantom thread or spotlight or boyhood or shape of water. These movies are inconsequential.

To who? Not to the millions of people who enjoy them. It's rather silly to say something is inconsequential because mere millions will enjoy it, as opposed to tens or hundreds of millions.

On top of that, I see two large problems with this posture:

First, it confuses short-term fame with "consequence." More people will see a crappy Transformers sequel in the first year than will see Spotlight...but how many people will keep thinking about it after they've seen it? How many will think about it years later? How many people will write a thematic analysis of it? How many film students will study it? Fame is not consequence: that's why they're different words. You are confusing breadth with depth.

Second, you're not even just measuring viewership, but viewership on initial release. A film deemed important by viewers and critics is seen over and over for decades after release, so it's not hard for a so-called "inconsequential" critical darling to end up being seen quite a bit more after release than some mindless blockbuster. Again, to say nothing of the amount of actual minutes people spend thinking about each film.

The real problem isn't that you make these assumptions, though, but that you don't seem to realize it's happening. Your decision to measure importance and success in raw (and short-term!) viewership totals is your prerogative, but you don't seem to register the fact that you've made a choice at all. You treat it as a default, as a null hypothesis. But it isn't. There is absolutely nothing empirical (or even especially compelling, to my mind, but definitely not empirical) about your decision to use this particular metric to measure importance. You can if you want, but you can't cite it as if it's some kind of objective marker others must honor. It's just the thing you've decided to care about most, for whatever reason.

You think phantom thread or there will be blood is seen by more people than blockbusters ? more people might have seen those crappy stallone action movies from 80s than these two.

You are again confusing transformers with movies like the dark knight or inception. Vast majority but not all film students are a bitter bunch of people with demigod complex. Most of them will not make it. I will be much happier if those who do make it end up making movies like inception or interstellar or apocalypse now or lawrence of arabia or 2001 space odyssey or titanic or hitchcock movies or ford v ferrari on a bigger scale than movies like annie hall or guess who is coming for dinner or sophie's choice or any of the pretentious PTA movies. I am not saying we only need movies like transformers but i can see why they are being made. But it is what they do with the money they make from those movies that matters. They can either make original prestige blockbusters or make movies about 2 people whose marriage dont work. Those movies should go to netflix and stay there. As much as i didnt like 1917, I think that movie is atleast a step in right direction.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Prolly something to do with all those movies meeting the arbitrary standards you originally posted that define your take on what makes a great movie. People asked you to clarify, to add a bit more evidence to support the post because it was too broad and most anything could fit that definition. Now, posters are citing other movies and they don't fit your definition. This seems to not be thought out past the impulse.


These movies, here, because. Not those movies, there, because - x.

No, I don't think that. You can tell from quotes like these, which are specifically granting that premise in order to explain why it doesn't necessarily matter:

The only thing within a mile of what you just asked me is me noting that the difference is probably mitigated over time.

This seems to keep happening: I make a simple, straightforward argument, and you ask me a rhetorical question based on some totally inexplicable misreading of it (here's your really obviously misrepresenting the point about inflation, alongside my actual statement). Either it's deliberate, or you're not reading these posts very carefully. Either way, please knock it off.

Nope. I'm using it as an example of why the premise is flawed.

I know it's standard practice on the Internet to make opinions sound stronger through sheer overstatement, but if you somehow hadn't noticed, that kinda stuff doesn't fly around here.

Your armchair psychoanalysis of film students isn't any more valuable or trenchant than your armchair psychoanalysis of actors and the choices they make. I don't see any indication there's real insight or knowledge behind either, and the only thing I do see is a consistent misunderstanding of human nature, based on taking your own preferences or metrics of significance and assuming they're universal.

Cool, so we're left with what all these threads end up being: you stating your personal preference for one type of film over another, but trying really really hard to make it sound like something more empirical or objective than a normal personal preference.

Also, you asked me to restate my question/point (which has happened three or four times now), and then didn't respond to it.

You also didn't explain your response on inflation, which as far as I can tell is just based on straight-up ignorance of how inflation works. Which is fine, you haven't professed to be an economist or anything and I'm not going to dunk on someone for not being familiar with it. What's troublesome about that is that it means you argued with what I said about inflation without having any idea what it meant. That's not good.

I dunno if you bothered to look up "overfitting" either, but you really should, because it perfectly describes what's happening in the OP.

Yeah, by aronisred's logic Ford v Ferrari should not have cost $97m to make a movie about racing in Le Mans when the Steve McQueen vehicle Le Mans is a movie about racing in Le Mans that only cost about $7m to make.

And you are making the same mistake of combining financially successful movies with objectively great movies. Even if I do separate the "dumb" blockbusters like Transformers from the "smart" blockbusters like Inception, at the end of the day you're still arguing for blockbusters even though a lot of the most acclaimed movies tend to operate on much smaller budgets. I just checked the budgets on Paul Thomas Anderson's films and the highest is Phantom Thread at a whopping $35m. He seems like the kind of filmmaker who's smart enough to know that higher budgets cause greater interference from studios and executives so he works relatively cheap and is able to make his films his way, which ends up resulting in highly acclaimed films that earn awards, recognition, and their budgets back. Quite a few of the Best Picture winners have had similarly small budgets compared to the nine-figure blockbusters that tend to dominate the box office year after year - Moonlight only cost about $1m, for example. So no, I can't expect studios to spend $80m on movies like that because they literally do not cost that much in the first place. Saying that studios should simply focus on making good movies (or improving the quality of the most financially successful ones) is not a particularly insightful observation to build your topic around and listing the films that you do or do not think should be made isn't much of a defence.

PTA movies are inconsequential. They don't have broad appeal. The people who like his movies think of themselves as sophisticated moviegoers and are insecure about their own tastes that they have to write about it all over social media.

To your point regarding budgets of those....yes those moves specifically dont deserve more budget but moreover they don't deserve theatrical release as well...they should be straight to VOD movies or movies made by netflix like roma. Those movies shouldn't ask audience to come to movie theaters and spend the same amount of money as an 80+ million $ to watch them. The rule is simple..any movie with budget less than 80 million should be a vod or streaming movie no matter the quality. That is when directors will aim to think bigger in scale make more epics.

Are you honestly telling me that you've never liked a movie that isn't famous or popular?

Here's all the stuff I said in response to this last time, none of which was acknowledged or addressed. I've bolded the parts that act as summaries, just in case that actually helps me get a substantive response:

You have decided broad appeal = consequence. You are free to decide this, but you don't seem to realize you've made that decision, and that it's an arbitrary one. It is not a law of the universe. It is not empirical. It is not a simple fact you can cite. None of your preferred metrics for importance or success are. They're just your preferred metrics.

It would be just as valid to say people who say this kinda thing are unsophisticated and insecure about their film knowledge, and disparage other people's tastes to overcompensate for it. But that would be an unfair, cheap generalization, just like this is.

At what point do we get actual arguments, rather than disguised preferences? "I've decided this is what matters and I'm going to act like it's a fact, rather than my preference" isn't an argument. Neither is "here's my wildly uncharitable speculation about people's psychological motives for things, which I have no actual knowledge of or insight into." And that seems to be what every single one of these threads boils down to when we try to unpack them.

Yeah, well, a hard-R $7m indie horror-comedy about a Wall Street executive who brutally murders people in his spare time doesn't exactly have broad appeal either, but I'm sure if I suggested that those qualities made American Psycho an inconsequential movie then you'd take umbrage with that.

The idea that a movie's worth is inherently tied to its budget (or lack thereof) is a fallacy. There are good cheap movies and bad expensive movies, so the idea that the latter automatically deserve theatrical release while the former does not would indicate a lack of concern for the actual quality of movies (or even just commercial success since cheaper movies are more likely to make their money back and turn a profit). This rule you suggest is not only extremely arbitrary (especially with an $80m cut-off, which seems like that would encourage a $70m movie to waste an extra $10m just to secure a theatrical release), but the idea that it would encourage directors and studios to make more epics would not be the solution you seem to think it is. I liked Inception and all, but I recognise that it (and Nolan's work in general) is an anomaly amidst the blockbuster landscape and that very few filmmakers could turn out work of that caliber if they were suddenly forced to work on that scale (and that's without accounting for how they may be compromised by studio interference anyway). Putting more money into bigger movies means that fewer movies get made and there's more pressure on those movies to succeed - we're already inundated with countless blockbusters whose success is meant to keep studios alive regardless of how good they actually are and your suggestion is that studios make more of them on the off chance that we end up getting the next Nolan out of it? To put it simply, bigger is not always better.

Totally agree. Sums it up nicely.

Re: Great big budget movies never flop in theaters
 

Would Terminator: Dark Fate be a big budget movie that flopped, according to this article:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...m-loss-1251926

This position is nonsensical when marketing budgets that cross over $100 million by themselves exist, which is has been the norm for big budget releases since the turn of the last decade (at least).

And when you consider market whales, conglomerates like Walt Disney Co. can afford a cumulative $6 billion in marketing for box office releases during the 2018-2019 seasons alone. How "great" a movie becomes completely irrelevent at this stage. This elite-tier of financial resources for market coverage alone guarantees that a release will perform well at the box office.

$80+ million hasn't been considered "big budget" for ~10 years, and even that's being conservative.*