> It must be really off the wall for a studio to not invest in that.
Not necessarily, it's gotten much harder to produce projects that aren't commercially marketable IP like Marvel.
I listened to a Matt Damon interview recently and he basically wondered aloud if he could get a studio to make Good Will Hunting today, which made me sad to hear. Many of his early movies were low to mid-budget one-off dramas, which aren't really getting made anymore.
If you can't license your film's characters for games/toys/food/whatever, your project is a lot harder to pitch to execs in 2022.
The middle-ground movies like "Good Will Hunting" are, unfortunately, pretty much dead in the water right now, they have been since before the pandemic (I'd say since the early 2010s). Some directors and producers in France (because the same thing has been happening there, at another level) tried to do something about it by staging some protests around 2012-2013 if I'm not mistaken, this interview [1] (in French) from 2013 with Pascale Ferran, one of the main persons behind the movement, will add more details. Of course that nothing came out of the whole protest movement.
There is some (I think) temporary help from streaming and especially from Netflix when it comes to this type of movies ("The Irishman" is just one example), but, again and imo, I think this is just temporary and that in the long term Netflix and its kin will also give up on this type of movies. And, of course, you could say (like Scorsese himself sort of did) that watching movies on a TV screen is not really "watching movies", and I'm with Scorsese on that.
I would suspect it did not make that money back. The studios are in the movie business and not the lighting money on fire business.
I think we have just seen a fundamental shift in the tastes of the 18-35 demographic and what kind of movies they want to see. Quality fast food type movies as opposed to a full sit down multiple course meal type movie.
I love Coppola but I wouldn't want to invest in this project either at this point.
The consumption model has changed, and the tastes reflect that. If you're going to a movie theater a couple times a month, you always have to pick from what's available and what sounds good. If there always new, high quality stuff available at home, you'll pick what you're already invested in. That could be Marvel movies, or it could be a tv show you already know you like.
Affleck said (in a recent interview with Damon) that he wouldn't be able to make Argo today as a movie. It'd have to be a six hour mini-series.
Not necessarily, it's gotten much harder to produce projects that aren't commercially marketable IP like Marvel.
I listened to a Matt Damon interview recently and he basically wondered aloud if he could get a studio to make Good Will Hunting today, which made me sad to hear. Many of his early movies were low to mid-budget one-off dramas, which aren't really getting made anymore.
If you can't license your film's characters for games/toys/food/whatever, your project is a lot harder to pitch to execs in 2022.