The Death of the Mid-Budget Movie

Mid-budget movies were a veritable way for actors to expand their range and avoid being typecast. So why did they die out?

There seems to be this stark duality for filmmakers nowadays.

Hollywood is only banking on movies based on renowned franchises with utterly colossal budgets. But as I was informed by my professors when I got my film producer certificate in 2021, there’s more opportunities than ever for indie and low-budget filmmakers to find audiences and funding thanks to streaming platforms and simplified distribution.

The massive IP head of this fish continues to feed on superhero movies and endless reboot culture while its small indie tail glides it through the ocean.

But what about the middle? What happened to the mid-budget production?

Why has it seemingly died out?

What Makes a Mid-Budget Movie

Mid-budget movies are loosely defined as having a production budget between $5–50 million. Some producers even define that upper end more liberally, up to $75–100 million, although $5 million would easily be an indie film with decent production values (think of 2000s indie juggernauts The Room and Shaun of the Dead, both of which were produced for about $6 million each). Millennials in particular feel nostalgic for mid-budget movies because they hit their peak when we were growing up and coming of age from the 1980s to the mid 2000s, right around the advent of Netflix but before streaming became the norm.

Mid-budget movies weren’t always memorable hits that got nominated for awards. They could become cult classics like Pineapple Express or redeemed by time like Freddy Got Fingered, but they also encompass all these movies you can watch for free on YouTube Movies that came out in this same era.

80s and 90s mid-budget flicks have this certain charm to them, even the movies that wound up being flops: sometimes they were blatant cash grabs and the actors were just phoning it in as a result, or they were fairly forgettable roles with paper-thin writing that preceded an actor’s big break. Hell, not just actors — the film world was SCREAMING upon finding out that noted DP Janusz Kaminski did the lighting for Vanilla Ice’s now-cult classic cringefest Cool as Ice before he worked on Schindler’s List.

The mid-budget movie has encompassed unintentionally hilarious turkeys to hyped-up Academy nominees (some of which may have been overhyped). The range is wider than you think since they’re not given leviathan blockbuster budgets, but aren’t tiny indie films made with spit and staples that go on to become classics like Clerks.

So if there’s more indie opportunities than ever, why hasn’t this been translating to mid-budget flicks?

The Death of Movie Theaters, Post-Release Monetization, and Attention Spans

Mid-budget movies present a major risk in the modern era of film. Box office performance is what films used to ride on before the home video market became this intractable institution that was later subsumed by streaming. Statista found that 41% of American respondents to their movie theater survey claimed that they rarely went to the movies. The pandemic clearly didn’t help.

While there’s mid-budget movies being made specially for streaming platforms today, it has to get a theatrical release to be considered for major award shows. While indie and low-budget films get special screenings at those off the beaten path small theaters and the Alamo Drafthouse franchise, you pretty much need a blockbuster budget or at least the extremely high end of mid-budget to get distribution from major theater chains like AMC.

Gone are the days when you had to check a newspaper or use a landline phone to find out what movies were playing at the nearest theater, and taking a chance on a random one! Mid-budget movies can still pack rooms at Alamo Drafthouse and other specialty theaters, but it’s massive franchises like Marvel movies that fill the coffers of corporate box offices.

Home video drastically changed in turn. Purchases and rentals of physical VHS tapes and DVDs were often a major money-maker, to the point it was practically a second opening. There were different formats like Beta tapes and Laserdisc, but VHS held the crown until DVD and Blu-ray started eclipsing it by the turn of the millennium. With those slim cases, no need to rewind, and all the extra content that could fit on a DVD, it’s no wonder that mid-budget movies grew like weeds in the final 10 years or so of their heyday.

Home video was also how cult movies were born, long before curated lists by film geeks on YouTube. Poor box office performance wasn’t always an indicator that sales and rentals would do poorly, as Showgirls proved. But before streaming, fans would have to prove there was a market for DVDs of what they hoped wouldn’t become lost media, as I covered in my treatise on the DVDaria campaign in the heyday of Internet fandom culture through Outpost Daria.

When a movie got replayed on TV, there were also residual payments from those airings. Now that streaming is the norm, this accounts for two major post-theatrical release income streams totally dried up.

Read: it makes the mid-budget flick an even bigger financial risk than it was when we all still had Blockbuster, Suncoast, and/or Hollywood Video cards.

Because the production now isn’t going to make all of its money back as easily, this is why everything is a $1–10 million beefed-up indie film or a $200 million Marvel movie.

But while the death of all these things also spells the death of the mid-budget movie, it’s got nothing on the death of our attention spans even if you don’t have ADHD. FilmStack did this brilliant take on how TikTok and short-form video has actually shaped the way that movies are made today:

He points out that movies today have more action packed into them than they did previously, compared to the slower storytelling seen in films of the past. This ultimately depends on genre and cultural norms— for instance, American audiences have embraced Studio Ghibli movies where it’s a norm in Japanese storytelling to take far longer than they would in an American animated feature — but given many peoples’ propensity to grab their phones when a movie starts getting slow, there’s definitely less subtle environmental storytelling and artistry than there is action to keep that dopamine flowing and your eyes on the screen.

But this goes beyond the movie theater experience, or even watching the movie at home: DVD sales, ad campaigns for them, and just talking to other moviegoers at the local video store was a way that films stayed relevant.

Now if the algorithms on Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube aren’t churning with constant blather about that movie, everyone forgets about it and quickly moves on to the next thing. With so much TV, movies, and original content to view out there, how long have some movies sat on your watchlist? Crazy Rich Asians sat on mine for three solid years until I finally watched it on a cross-country flight!

What We Lost with the Mid-Budget Movie

Every creative venture has risk. Movies are no exception.

But when people lament that “they don’t make movies like this anymore”, there’s a couple different ways that could be interpreted. It could be about the downright horrific things that often made it into movies without blinking, like all the sexual assault in Saturday Night Fever and Revenge of the Nerds and someone’s going to whine about everyone is too sensitive and PC because you can’t just shout a bunch of racial slurs without context anymore.

What we actually lost was variety in our media, and creative risk-taking.

Part of why we get so nostalgic about movies from the past isn’t just our associations with our imagination-rich childhoods and movie-going experiences of yore. 80s and 90s movies in particular, when the mid-budget movie really peaked, were really a time that filmmakers were allowed to GET WEIRD.

Sure, subcultures like the punk and metal scenes love low-budget horror movies and portrayals of the scenes themselves, like Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia. There’s even entire subcultures dedicated to low-budget movies, like The Room and its cult following. But mid-budget films gave cast and crew more leeway to get weird and experiment, and see what took hold versus what got laughed at in the future (the games industry’s obsession with full motion video in the mid-90s comes to mind).

There was also more “star power” in movies of the past, when a famous actor is what got butts into movie theater seats rather than the derivative work or even the director. The 90s was peak for this because you had the older generation of Hollywood handing the torch to this young new set of actors, producers, and directors, whereas today you have many YouTubers and TikTokers making the pivot to film rather than the other way around. Celebrity culture completely changed from intentionally staying private and paparazzi invading your personal space when you went out to dinner to purposely curating an Instagram feed and forming parasocial relationships with fans.

As Matt Damon put it, streaming killed the studio system more or less but it also killed actors’ ability to spread their wings and that sucks.

That charm in 80s and 90s mid-budget movies largely speaks to Millennial and Gen X nostalgia, but it speaks to a time when studios were just more willing to take risks on a director, actor, script, or method. As previously mentioned, these movies were unafraid to get weird.

There were no reams of data about viewer habits and what else Netflix and Hulu subscribers watch versus what they click away from. Focus groups were more about test audiences’ views of the actual movie rather than the demography around it. You didn’t know if you’d have a sleeper hit, a cult classic, a total bomb, or one of those forgettable movies that gets lukewarm reviews and box office performance that Millennials now leave on in the background while doing housework in the homes we don’t own.

Not every movie is going to be a blockbuster, or get submitted to the Library of Congress for its cultural impact. But we won’t know until more creators are given the chance and the funding, and it doesn’t seem sustainable to just have this “donut hole” of shoestring budgets on one side and GDPs exceeding Eastern European countries on the other.

Will the Mid-Budget Movie Make a Comeback?

Movie Web posits that for certain genres, mid-budget movies could be making a comeback. Thrillers in particular are a good fit for mid-budget because they provide a contrast to the multiple seasons of hour-long episodes of long-running TV shows that kept people binge-watching and glued to their seats. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and other shows exceeding five seasons with a large cast of characters and suspense that kept you wanting more ironically may have played a role in mid-budget thrillers seeing more demand.

With the writers’ strike taking place at the time of writing this, screen writers have reported that their incomes have drastically decreased in the streaming era and they are demanding fairer pay. Perhaps a successful strike will set a blueprint for equitable compensation in the streaming era, and inspire other ways for studios to recoup development budgets.

If indie and low-budget production companies and filmmakers also get at least slightly larger production budgets to work with after enough proven successes, a mid-budget renaissance could be inevitable.