The most consequential industry shift of the last twenty years isn't streaming or franchises. It's the disappearance of the $20-50m adult drama.
The most-consequential structural shift in mainstream American cinema in the last twenty years is not, in fact, the streaming wars. It is not the dominance of franchises. It is not the changing audience demographics. Those are all visible effects of an underlying shift: the disappearance, almost completely, of the mid-budget adult drama from theatrical release.
Look at the 1996 Best Picture nominees: Fargo ($7m), Secrets & Lies ($4.5m), Shine ($6m), Jerry Maguire ($50m), The English Patient ($27m). All five films were mid-budget adult dramas. All five were released theatrically. All five were in the broad commercial mainstream that year. None of these films, made today at these budgets, would receive a wide theatrical release. Most would be made for streaming.
Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, a $25m American adult drama could profit on a combination of: a theatrical run grossing $40-80m domestically, an international theatrical release adding another $20-40m, a robust DVD aftermarket adding $30-60m, and pay-cable and broadcast licensing adding further revenue across several years. The math worked because four separate revenue streams summed to enough to cover the production and marketing costs of the original release.
By the mid-2010s, this revenue stack had collapsed. The DVD market was almost gone. International theatrical was increasingly franchise-dominated. Cable licensing fees had shrunk. The theatrical run had to do almost all the work — and a $25m adult drama could no longer reliably do $40-80m domestically against competing big-IP releases.
The decade's industrial response was simple: stop making the films. The studios shifted production toward two extremes — the high-budget franchise tentpole ($150m+) and the low-budget genre or horror release ($5-20m). The mid-budget zone — the $20-60m adult drama that had been the studios' bread and butter for decades — was abandoned.
The work migrated. Streaming platforms picked up the form. Netflix's Marriage Story (2019), The Irishman (2019), Roma (2018), and many others were made at budgets that, in 1996, would have been studio productions. Apple TV+ has taken Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). Amazon has taken multiple Coen brothers, Park Chan-wook, and Sofia Coppola projects.
The films are still being made. They are just no longer being made for theatres at scale. The few exceptions — A24's release pattern, Searchlight, Focus Features — are not enough to constitute a full theatrical mid-budget market.
The argument for caring about this shift is not nostalgia. It's structural. The mid-budget theatrical film was the form in which a director could make their second, third, fourth films at scale without becoming a franchise hire. Directors like Stephen Frears, Sidney Lumet, Lynne Ramsay, Mike Leigh, Mira Nair, Robert Altman — all of them depended on the mid-budget theatrical economy. Today's equivalent directors mostly cannot work at the same career rhythm.
Streaming has provided an alternative, but a different one. A streaming release does not produce the cultural footprint of a theatrical release. The audience experience is different (the home environment, the pause-and-resume option, the lack of dedicated attention). The economic feedback is different (no per-ticket revenue, no opening-weekend visibility). The director's relationship to the audience is different.
Two factors could plausibly restore the mid-budget theatrical film. First: streaming-platform fatigue, which the 2024-25 cancellation wave (Netflix removing titles, Max merging with Discovery, Disney+ losing subscribers) suggests may already be developing. Second: the rise of premium theatrical formats (IMAX, Dolby Cinema, large-format screens) that reward films designed for theatrical presentation.
Neither factor is yet strong enough to reverse the structural shift. The most-likely outcome for the rest of the 2020s is the current bifurcated model continuing: the franchise tentpole in cinemas, the mid-budget adult drama on streaming. Whether this is the permanent state of the industry or a transitional period remains to be seen.
For more on the industry shifts of the past decade, see our essays on The A24 Phenomenon and Why Foreign Films Are Finally Winning Best Picture.