Despicable Me 2 cost $76 Million to make vs. the $140M+ budgets for animated movies from Dreamworks and Pixar, and Illumination is taking in more international box office than either. Given their string of recent misses, the biggest shakeup is going to be at Dreamworks, as they figure out how to stay in the animated movie business. Moreover, given that Monster's U is estimated to have cost $200M and Disney's notorious penny pinching ways, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Pixar be negatively affected by the suits at Disney and their desire to maximize "shareholder value". Similarly Olympus Has Fallen's $70M budget vs. White House Down's $150M is the difference between a minor hit and an all out flop. Of course, the right thing to do would be for studios to be more like Pixar, increase their development budgets, be highly systematic and spend much more time polishing and refining scripts and projects before they go into production. But that's unlikely to happen, and as always the onus will fall on the writers who will need to become increasingly cost conscious with regards to set pieces, CGI and other special effects and stunts.

Neither JOHN CARTER (a great movie criminally mis-marketed) nor THE LONE RANGER were original material, and neither one was directed by anything remotely approaching a "budding auteur." When I think "budding auteur," I think of Neil Blomkamp making DISTRICT 9 for $30 million. (FWIW, I wouldn't refer to SNOW WHITE & THE HUNTSMAN or THIS IS 40 as original material, either.) The key here is the budget. I thought BATTLESHIP was OK, but I don't see how they looked at that script and thought it was anything more than a fun 'B' picture. If they'd budgeted $100 million instead of $200 million, it probably still would've grossed the same amount.

To me, Battleship felt like a movie made by people who don't truly understand or even enjoy the genre and just wanted to cynically string together a bunch of set pieces. OTOH, District 9 (and later Chronicle, which cost $12M) showed everyone that you could make a sincere and engaging sci-fi movie with decent CGI and special effects for a moderate budget and still have box-office success. For studios chasing decent return on moderate investment, targeting one or two quadrants, these would seem to be the *exact* type of movie you'd expect to be made from a first timer script. To be honest, I'm a little puzzled as to why so few are made.