So many bad movies are being released constantly – are they all losing money?

Question

I really don’t get it how it works. Making a movie costs a lot of money, even if it is not a blockbuster.

So many TERRIBLE movies are being released every month. How are all they making profit?

In: Other

Answer 1

People ITT are just pretending that they live on another planet, so I’ll try and answer. What you’re talking about, the seemingly constant stream of garbage, uncreative, poorly made movies, is the result of a bunch of different systems that are dedicated to making movies that make money. So in fact, it’s the opposite- so many terrible movies are being released *because* they make so much money.

The quality of a movie is not what determines its success. In fact, good movies are often less successful for reasons I’ll explain. Hollywood is a business, and today at least, their only goal is to increase the returns at the box office.

Audiences, in general, do not care or notice if a movie is well made or not. In fact, a lot of peoples measure of a well made movie is as weak as ‘I liked it’. This is a lesson Illumination learned with the first Despicable Me: they put a ton of effort into making a good story with characters and stakes that people care about, but what most audiences took away was ‘hahahahaha banana minion’.

So with each next movie they made, they put less effort into the things that made the first one good, like story, characters, and decent animation, and dedicated more screen time to the thing that actually got butts in seats, the minions.

On a macro scale, this is what is happening in the mainstream film industry. They are actively trying to produce ‘hits,’ using more and more cynical tricks to draw in audiences, rather than making a good piece of art that becomes a hit organically. All through the creative process, every decision is being made with the goal of increasing the movies profitability/audience appeal, rather than some artistic goal.

TL;DR: Movies are worse now because the motivation of the people making them is not to make a good movie, but a profitable movie, and the things that make a profitable movie almost always make it less good.