Did you know that the average Hollywood movie budget today is close to $100 million? In our modern day and age, a majority of United States moviegoers have noticed a decline in the quality of the cinema we all know and love. Not only this, but the budgets for these disasters suspiciously grow bigger and bigger, while decreasing in quality. . This is seen through various different genres of movies, with some infamous film companies who you may be very familiar with. 

       Starting with a look into the film industry as a whole, there are already very efficient methods of acquiring funding for projects. For reference, private investors, studio financing, and crowdfunding are all tactics that can generate as much as $100 million for a project. Having budgets this large, the average person would expect a high quality, engaging movie with little to no negative aspects. Though in recent years, the results have been quite the opposite. Many of these insanely expensive films fail to financially make even half of their budgets. Some go  completely under the radar and are silently released without much advertisement. This seems incredibly suspicious, especially for the amount of money being put into these movies. Knowing this, most can’t help but to wonder: “Where does this budget go and how could the films have done this bad?” 

      What better way to show this than with a recent example ? One movie in particular that did horribly was Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which was released in 2024 and was very poorly marketed. The movie had a budget of $120 million, yet only made $4 million on opening day and $11.5 million in total. Despite $20 million being spent on advertising, most people hadn’t heard of the film’s existence, raising questions as to how it could have done so poorly with such extreme funding.

     This trend doesn’t just end with Megalopolis. There are so many films and tv shows with huge budgets that utterly fail in the end. Some more film examples include Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, which had a budget of $70 million and made $15 million domestically, and Moonfall, which had a budget of $150 million and made $67 million worldwide. With this becoming such a common trend for films recently , it’s reasonable to say that these productions are being made with lower quality than expected, resulting in their ultimate failures in the box office. But, with continuous negative results, why are film companies so persistent on continuing this pattern? The trend seems to be getting worse and worse, with movies spending more to make less, and advertising for these films being at an all time low. Despite this, film companies appear to be completely unaffected, and continue to produce more expensive films that are destined for failure with such poor advertising.

     A very well known company that's no stranger to this phenomenon is Amazon, which has produced major failures that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. An example of this is their spinoff series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which had a budget of nearly one billion dollars, and spent around $465 million on the first season. This show, which was barely advertised in the first place, very clearly hadn’t captivated its audience. Only 36% of United States viewers who began watching finished the entire first season. Not only this, but the cast featured no actors who drew attention and it lacked  showrunners who seemed to have any experience. This was  a tremendously damaging flop for the filmmaking industry, as so much money had been invested into the production of the series  with very little to show for it. A majority of the viewers claim the show lacked  action or interesting plot points, with many stating it was full of strictly boring conversation. For a film production that had spent a definite $465 million dollars, it is concerning how the final product wasn’t representative of this, leading film watchers to question the validity of the money going into the project. 

     One last example of this is another Amazon production: Citadel. It had a production budget of $300 million for six episodes. This production had been received extremely poorly — or maybe not at all, because so few people were even aware of its  existence. There were even reports of “cost overruns,” which is surprising for a $300 million production. This amount of funding is incomprehensibly large for a show, especially considering the fact that so many others have achieved even more with just a fraction of the cost. Nevertheless, this series was labeled a “disappointment” by critics, and received bad reviews from the small audience who watched it. Such an insane amount of money for a production that has little to show for it seems concerningly suspicious, raising the question as to if this money is truly being utilized, or pocketed for other unknown reasons.

      With all else considered, these recent films all depict a common trend of being produced with an insanely large budget, but  performing extremely poorly. Audiences are left to wonder why these companies continue to invest such large amounts of money  into something that’s even remotely profitable. Knowing these companies are hiring inexperienced executives and handing them such high amounts of money, could there be something bigger going on that surpasses the surface level? Some speculate that their is money being pocketed behind the scenes. Others believe the projects are simply just paying too much for outcomes that aren’t as good as they could be. Regardless of what’s going on behind the scenes, it’s clear that it’s had a massive impact on the production quality of recent films, despite such large budgets.