There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. A film like The Help (which cost only $25 million to make, not including marketing costs) earned a nice profit for the studio grossing $211 million at the box office but don't expect any sequels, cartoons or Minny pies at Disneyland. It makes business sense for the studios to focus as much energy and money as possible on the biggest films that will generate the most revenue down the line. These are what their budgets and grosses looked like: 
 
 The Relic: $40 million budget, $34 million domestic gross 
 
 The Beautician and the Beast: $16 million budget, $11 million domestic gross 
 
 Private Parts: $20 million budget, $41 million domestic gross 
 
 The Saint: $68 million budget, $118 million worldwide gross 
 
 Breakdown: $36 million budget, $50 million domestic gross 
 
 Night Falls on Manhattan: $22 million budget*, $9 million domestic gross 
 
 ‘Til There Was You: $10 million budget, $3.5 million domestic gross 
 
 Face/Off: $80 million budget, $245 million worldwide gross 
 
 Kiss Me, Guido: $740K budget, $1.9 million domestic gross 
 
 Good Burger: $9 million budget, $23.7 million domestic gross 
 
 Event Horizon: $60 million budget, $26 million domestic gross 
 
 A Smile Like Yours: $18 million budget, $3.3 million domestic gross 
 
 In & Out: $35 million budget, $64 million domestic gross 
 
 Kiss the Girls: $27 million budget, $61 million domestic gross 
 
 FairyTale: A True Story: n/a budget, $14 million domestic gross 
 
 Switchback: $38 million budget, $6 million domestic gross 
 
 The Rainmaker: $40 million budget, $46 million domestic gross 
 
 Titanic: $200 million budget, $2.187 billion worldwide gross 
 
 The Education of Little Tree: n/a budget, $323K gross 
 
 Budget figures are unavailable for two of those films, but based on the final product, they seem to have been pretty low-budget efforts. (Interestingly, these were the only titles with worldwide box office numbers currently available.) “It feels incredibly vulnerable to me,” he says.
– Wonder what happened to iconic film directors like David Lynch, John Waters, and Francis Ford Coppola? Well, Hollywood checked the balance sheet and decided to stop making their kind of mid-budget films, Flavorwire reports. It's all dollars and cents: Thoughtful or offbeat films costing $5 million to $60 million can make moderate profits at best, while blockbusters with international appeal are able to bring in sick money. Paramount's Titanic made that point in 1997 by costing $200 million and earning nearly $2.2 billion worldwide. At that time, mid-budget films like Kiss the Girls and In & Out dominated the Paramount slate and drew modest profits; this year, mega-flicks like Transformers: Age of Extinction, Hercules, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rule Paramount's roost and earn the big bucks. "You could make movies in the ten-to-twenty-million-dollar budget range" at one time, says Susan Seidelman, director of Desperately Seeking Susan. Now, she says, studios "have to appeal to every demographic in every part of the world." And few seasoned directors want to test the indie market, where tons of under-$2 million films are vying for attention. So Spike Lee has funded a film via Kickstarter, Steven Soderbergh publicly quit feature filmmaking last year, and other directors are turning to TV for creative freedom. This sea-change has been coming for years now, as an old Forbes piece shows, but some—including Steven Spielberg—believe Hollywood will over-invest in blockbusters: "There’s going to be an implosion" where several "mega-budgeted movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm again," he says.