Big release

I've been wrestling with some of these ideas. Why does every movie need to be released and do massively well opening weekend? Some books do that, sure. The big sellers. And other books take years and word-of-mouth to be a hit. For those books, generally they haven't wasted money on a huge release, because they know what kind of book they have. But every movie, regardless, feels like it needs to be treated the same. 

Why can't you have good, quality, smaller movies, and allow them to build over time? Eventually making their money back. 

I'm hoping that as the digital market expands, you'll see room for different types of releases. 

It's the same problem Soderbergh noted with Liberace. I think his numbers were, the $5M budget movie needed to make $120M just to break even. Which is absurd. With $30-40M going to marketing, and $30-40M going to theater owners as part of their distribution split. 

Obviously what I'm talking about would be non-theatrical releases. With growth hacker / lean startup marketing techniques.