The great screenwriter William Goldman had a famous quote about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” His full quote elaborated: “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” Goldman meant that, beforehand, nobody (neither the producers, studio executives, directors, actors, or critics) could accurately predict which movies would be breakout hits or which would be box office duds. There are always surprises in both directions: movies everyone thinks will succeed end up bombing, while surefire flops become smash hits. At least that’s the way the movie industry used to work. Now Hollywood thinks they know everything.

Producing movies was similar to angel investing: you make lots of small bets, knowing most will lose, but one or two wins will pay off massively, more than making up for all the losses. Because Hollywood didn’t know anything, financiers would gamble on new filmmakers and creative ideas because they never knew if those movies might turn into a big hit. Most of the time they didn’t, but on rare occasions, one of those small bets would turn into Jaws. This resulted in a healthy ecosystem of some great films, also some bad ones, but lots in the middle—not just in quality, but in creativity. There were wildly different types of movies being made. Studios took chances on novelty and weirdness. 

“Nobody knows anything” was true in Hollywood when William Goldman was in the industry—in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and even into the early 2000s—but that filmmaking ecosystem no longer exists today. Somewhere in the 2010s, with the rise of superhero movies and other big-budget tentpoles, Hollywood thought they figured out a winning formula—a bet that would always win and never lose. If they made a huge spectacle movie based on popular pre-existing intellectual property, they were almost certainly guaranteed a hit. This required making big bets—spending $200 million on the budget—but then they were virtually assured to make at least $300 million at the box office, an easy $100 million profit (with upside for much more if it turned into an Avengers-like billion-dollar smash-hit). So studios repeated this formula over and over with Marvel, DC, Transformers, Star Wars, and Pixar… It was like taking candy from a baby. Hollywood suddenly knew everything—or at least something (IP + CGI = $$$).

Hence everything in Hollywood from the 2010s through the 2020s became special effects-laden mega-budget blockbusters based on pre-existing material, while the middle-budget original dramas disappeared from the pipeline. Why spend $20 million on ten small movies to maybe make $100 million—if you’re lucky—when you can spend $200 million on one big movie and make an easy $100 million—and if you’re lucky, make a billion. Original movies were only made outside of the studio system, independently for much lower budgets. Occasionally one of those low-budget indies would blow up big at the box office. (Such as 2017’s Get Out produced by Blumhouse, which made over $250 million off a budget of just $4.5 million. Or 2018’s A Quiet Place produced by Platinum Dunes, which made $340 million off a budget of $17 million.) Did the major studios regret not financing those films themselves? Not really—they just scooped up the talent and hired them to make their next movie—either a sequel to the hit or a superhero movie based on IP they owned. As cynical as this sounds, Hollywood seemed to be right because their big bets kept paying off. So was Goldman’s famous quote wrong? Did Hollywood finally know everything? Not so fast.

We’re starting to see a turn of the tides where those big-budget sequels/reboots/requels aren’t guaranteed hits anymore. There are diminishing returns. Superhero fatigue is setting in because the market is oversaturated with similar movies. If you think you found a formula that always makes a profit, and you keep making movies with that same formula, people are going to get bored. Hollywood is different from other industries because of the subjective artistic element. Creative industries require creativity, and creativity requires novelty.

Westerns were huge in Hollywood—until they weren’t. Superhero movies will follow the same path. Audiences are eventually going to want something new and different. I was hoping that would have come sooner, as superhero fatigue hit me a decade ago, but maybe it’s finally reached the normies. Looking at the ever-growing list of recent big-budget flops, especially from the previously always-successful Marvel, it is clear that the “guaranteed hit” formula is no longer a guarantee. Or as William Goldman said, “Nobody knows anything.”

This is fantastic news. If we are now back to the stage where nobody knows anything in Hollywood, and there is no guaranteed formula for financial success, then studios are going to have to take chances again. They’re going to have to throw lots of darts and take risks on young unknown filmmakers with novel and weird ideas, hoping that some of their bets pay off and turn into the next Christopher Nolan. 

Movies like Memento were not being made by Hollywood in the 2010s, because why bother when you have Magneto. Of course Nolan also made superhero movies, but The Dark Knight transcended the genre and its success propelled Nolan to be able to make any movie he wanted—big-budget original science fiction like Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet—exactly the types of movies I want to see more of. Nolan’s original movies were big hits too, but Hollywood remains hesitant to fund unproven filmmakers to try to do the same. Why risk failure on something new when you own the rights to Spiderman?

The Hollywood system as it currently operates will never develop the next Christopher Nolan. But if “Nobody knows anything,” and big-budget pre-existing IP is not a guaranteed success anymore, Hollywood will have no choice but to place bets on the new and unknown. If they don’t, “Garage Kubricks” using AI film generators soon will.