One could just as easily remain at home, without any noise or distraction. But what to watch? Not another Hollywood blockbuster. A classic horror film, such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) would be a welcome change. The film is excellent, surprise! A search on Google tells that it only cost $60,000, only to make for a global box-office of $248,639,099— a massive 414 233% return on investment. The quality of such a film offers a most wonderful alternative to Hollywood blockbusters, which all too often confuse CGI spectacle with substance.
Small Players
Hollywood’s bloated blockbusters are facing a quiet rebellion from independent films. Low-budget hits like Everything Everywhere All at Once ($14 million budget, $140 million gross) and Sound of Freedom ($14.5 million budget, $250 million gross) prove that good storytelling, not CGI, drives success. Everything Everywhere’s directors choose creativity over spectacle, while Sound of Freedom used grassroots marketing to bypass Hollywood entirely. Both films’ success highlights a growing trend: modern audiences are still willing to get themselves to a movie theatre, if something original awaits them there. It reveals just how exhausted mainstream Hollywood has become, especially when one keeps in mind how often it resorts to rebooting franchises which are way past their sell-by date.
Since Hollywood’s early days, the horror genre has been at the forefront of this evolution—many now-famous directors (among whom Francis Ford Coppola and Sam Raimi) began their career with a horror film. Even outside the horror genre, indie dramas like Lady Bird (2017) and Past Lives (2023) have shown that audiences crave ‘new’ stories. These films outperform many of Hollywood’s biggest productions. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, despite a budget of almost $300 million, struggled to break even. It's easier—and far more profitable—to succeed with a $10 million indie than to gamble on a blockbuster whose budgets—by making use of pricey actors and extensive CGI, not to mention marketing— are gargantuan.
And given that the marketing of major Hollywood productions is usually double the cost of the production budget, these films need to make twice their production budget at the box office to just break even.
