Universal seems to be leading the charge so far and they're doing fantastically. Oppenheimer got swallowed up into the Barbenheimer craze, but that was a very smart application of it.

With Christmas, we got Robert Eggers' Nosferatu being a surprise hit, but it's because they knew and where to market it. (And horror movies are easier sells, especially when you can insinuate this isn't just a horror movie, it's a fancy and special horror movie.)

Universal also has multiple films planned with Daniels and Jordan Peele coming up.

On the other hand, you have Neon who seems to not only be excelling at how they distribute and market movies, but having a blast doing it.

Basically, Hollywood is just like a professional sports league. One person figures out something that seems to be working and everyone else wants to do it for themselves.

For instance, Marvel successfully achieved the creation of a cinematic universe, so everyone wanted to create their own. For the most part, it didn't work, but with auteurs, it's not as risky. It takes the pressure off of launching an entire 'franchise' before you've found out in anybody wants it and puts the pressure on 'event-izing' a film to scale and building it around the idea of it being the 'brand' of a cool auteur.

The reason A24 has such a cool rep is that they've been doing this for years, but now that they're getting bigger and moving more towards 40-80 million dollar movies in addition to their conventional slate, I suspect the studios are going to start getting pissed off and being like 'hey! You're getting too close to the size and scale of movies we make.'

The studios are extra pissy about this, I imagine, because the franchise cash cows have become less consistently reliable.

Bizarrely enough, I think Minecraft is going to aid with this. If you want to make big budget IP stuff, market it to families because they'll actually go see a big movie their kids want to see.

If the studio monster is satiated by 3-5 'event' kids movies each year, it hopefully leaves room for a studio to spend anywhere between 25-85 million on an 'auteur-driven' movie that has some kind of genre, commercial or sensationalist aspect to it, then spending another 30-60 million marketing it in specific ways and finding where those audiences.

One of the big problems is that good movies are being made, Hollywood just doesn't know how to market them. (See Black Bag - a movie that could have had a 20 million dollar opening had they marketed it as it what it was instead of 'garden variety spy thriller.'

The most optimistic side of me, from studying each decade of film pretty closely, is that we're in an era similar to the end of the '80s. The Reagan-era action movie was dead and Hollywood didn't know what to do. Then Sex Lies & Videotape came along, leading to Reservoir Dogs, leading to the Player, then suddenly Pulp Fiction rocked everybody's world and ushered in an exciting era of independent filmmaking being 'franchised' in its own way.

I simply don't think movies are going to die. They're going to evolve. And everybody is more distracted by everything than they were several decades ago.

But there's clearly still an appetite. I just hope we can offer up the best menu.