MattRichmond
Developer | Grip | Photographer
Matt
Richmond
"The middle class of cinema has collapsed. We have castles in the sky and tents on the ground, but no houses."
The "Blockbuster" tier (>$80M) grew exponentially. Studios realized that in a global market, branding is everything. Marketing budgets often match production budgets, creating "too big to fail" events that crowd out everything else.
The $20M—$80M tier—once home to court-room dramas, rom-coms, and adult thrillers—has evaporated. It's the "Uncanny Valley" of finance: too expensive to be scrappy, too small to be an event. Streaming services have largely absorbed this category.
Kernel Density Estimation (Gaussian) was used to visualize the probability density of budgets per year, smoothing out the jagged raw count data to reveal the "U-Shape" shift.
Micro: <$5M
Low: $5M - $20M
Mid: $20M - $80M (The collapsed beam)
Blockbuster: >$80M
Adjusted for inflation? No. Raw USD values used to reflect industry nomenclature (a "$100M movie" is a psychological bracket, regardless of inflation).