Box office expectations and other movie troubles

My friend Suzanne is really annoyed that Superman Returns, which she really liked, is getting dismissed as a failure. She and I agree that box office expectations have just gotten so out of whack - if the movie doesn't blow away the previous record, it's written off as a failure. It's just not fair to perfectly successful movies that don't make all their money in the first weekend, which is where all the focus is these days. When X-Men 3 broke Spiderman 2's opening weekend record, it's place in history was assured. And then Pirates 2 came along and crushed X-3's numbers and now it's the only movie worth talking about (my husband and I saw it and we were both disappointed and agreed it isn't nearly as fun as the first one). Yet there's plenty of movies that make perfectly respectable returns, just not in the first 2 or 3 days. It's ridiculous.

Another topic we've discussed (and has been discussed on movie talk shows like Sunday Morning Shootout on AMC) is movie budgets and the observation that there's so few movies made anymore with mid-sized budgets. What's left are independent or smaller (and, by defintion, niche) movies made for under $25 million (like Brokeback Mountain) and movies with massive budgets, aiming for blockbuster glory (Pirates 2 was estimated to cost $250 million!) Our conclusion is that what's missing from Hollywood's offerings is exactly these mainstream, mid-size budget films (with budgets of around $40 million) that appeal to a wide audience, but not to the teenage male audience (that are typically required to send a movie into the financial stratosphere). In short, we bemoan the lack of ordinary films made for us.