Did This Flop Destroy the Mid-Budget Movie?

We've bemoaned the apparent loss of the mid-budget movie for a while now. Movies seem to be either bloated and monstrous, leading at times to huge losses, or they're scraped together by indie crews whose productions are held together by hopes and dreams alone.

Recently, at a keynote given at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Scottish director Kevin Macdonald brought up his 2009 feature State of Play.

"I didn't realize at the time, but looking back, that was a pivotal film in Hollywood, as well as for me, because it was sort of the end [of an era]," Macdonald said (via Deadline).

The film's stacked cast includes Russell Crowe, Rachel McAdams, Ben Affleck, Helen Mirren, Jason Bateman, Robin Wright, and Jeff Daniels. Crowe plays a journalist digging into a murder that might be tied to a politician.

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"Donna Langley mentioned it too when she did Desert Island Discs. It was a turning-point movie for her at Universal and the rest of Hollywood because it was conceived as an all-star, intelligent thriller for adults at $100 million. Can you imagine that today?"

No, Kevin, we can't.

Domestically, the movie tanked, bringing in just $37 million. The total box office was $87 million.

It's worth noting that people seem to like the movie, and if it were released today, it might do well on a streaming service. Alas, hindsight.

Macdonald revealed the script was originally pushed hard as a Brad Pitt vehicle. During rewrites, Macdonald and another well-known screenwriter tried to punch it up with this in mind.

"I got Tony Gilroy, who was very hot off the back of doing the Bourne films and many other great films," Macdonald said during the keynote. "We spent two months in his apartment, rewriting the script, spending untold amounts of money, and then showed it to Brad Pitt, and he hated it."

Macdonald lamented that this marked the end of the industry as it had been before.

"That was just the beginning of a long and very Hollywood-y saga, which I'm glad I had. It was the tail end of a certain kind of wasteful Hollywood filmmaking."

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World of Reel also points to Duplicity as another death knell for the mid-budget film. It had a budget of $60 million, starred Julia Roberts and Clive Owen as spies, but ended up with just $78 million at the box office.

Weirdly, both of these are Tony Gilroy scripts, and both were at Universal. It makes sense Gilroy would have been given a kind of carte blanche, coming off the brilliant Michael Clayton two years before.

The lesson here isn't that these were bad films. State of Play holds an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Duplicity sits at 65%. The problem was that studios had built their business model around the assumption that star-driven, adult-oriented thrillers could reliably turn a profit at these budget levels. When that assumption fell flat, the industry pivoted hard toward safer bets.

Today's version of the industry reflects those failures. The sweet spot that State of Play occupied—intelligent, star-driven entertainment for grown-ups at a substantial but not astronomical budget—has largely vanished from theatrical release.

Let us know your thoughts.