[saucetenuto]

Well, two things:

"Everyone you speak to" is probably a group of people very similar to you. That's how most peoples' social groups work, and it's hard to notice because your experience of them tends to factor out the similarities and focus on the differences.

The value of a potential moviegoer is almost a binary function of movie quality: the looks good enough to be worth the price of a ticket, or it doesn't. The marginal value of added quality past that point is slight, at least from a box office perspective. So to maximize revenue, you want your movie to exceed that threshold for as many people as possible. This is why the highest-grossing movies in any given year tend to be family-friendly comedies.

[ericd]

WRT marginal quality, I don't think that word of mouth buzz from great quality can be ignored - one of the ways to build a massive (and massively profitable) franchise like the Dark Knight/The Matrix/Toy Story is by making a really, really good movie.

It's getting a lot harder to "con" people into making a movie a blockbuster via advertising.

[ericd]

WRT marginal quality, I don't think that word of mouth buzz from great quality can be ignored - one of the ways to build a massive (and massively profitable) franchise like the Dark Knight/The Matrix/Toy Story is by making a really, really good movie.

[ericd]

Gah, stupid phone... sorry about this.