The Missing Middle in Movies, or Why Steven Spielberg and George Lucas Deserve to See the Empire Strike Back

In case you missed it, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas threw a hissy fit recently.  The subject of their rant? Their struggles to get movies financed. "You're talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can't get their movie into a theatre!" whined Lucas.

You might argue that this isn't such a bad thing; George Lucas has done very little of artistic value in the last thirty years. (Excepting, of course, the great "Howard the Duck.") The real issue, though, is that it simply isn't true. Independent studios would line up to make a movie with Spielberg or Lucas for $5 or $10 million.

But these directors don't want to work at that scale. That's plain enough in the case of Lucas, who long ago lost interest in making movies without explosions. Spielberg, on the other hand, could work on that budget; he's simply gotten spoiled. "Lincoln" was made for $65 million. That's an outrageous figure, when you consider that "Looper," an ambitious sci-fi movie with several major stars, cost $30 million, and "Zero Dark Thirty," which filmed in several different countries, cost $40 million.

But these boys won't work on the cheap, and once you get into the $20 to $30 million range, you have to deal with the major studios. The arthouse studios are happy to release a movie in 300 theaters and get their money back. But the bigger companies are going to want to release a movie in 3,000 theaters. That adds tens of millions of dollars in marketing costs, placing ever-mounting pressure on a movie to be commercially viable. "Iron Man" can work on that scale, but "Lincoln" is a tougher sell.

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Now, I'm being a little unfair to Spielberg and Lucas. The major studios don't have to release a movie on that many screens. They could have smaller releases, risk less, and recoup modest profits. Trouble is, they're not interested in that sort of small ball. They want hits, eye-popping ones.

This leaves us with a situation in which the middle has fallen out of the movies. Of the 2013 U.S. releases, I count only three that were released on more than 400 and less than 3,000 screens: "Mud," "The Bling Ring," and "Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain." We get the arthouse fare, released on a small number of screens with little fanfare, and the popcorn flicks, released worldwide with the usual bombastic CGI, and nothing in between.

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If only someone with knowledge of the industry, an interest in quality films, and deep pockets could help fill the gap. Who might we look to for such leadership? Well, how about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who are worth about $7 and $3 billion, respectively? (The ironies of a multibillionaire whining that his movie almost ended up on HBO boggle the mind.)

Unfortunately, these two are businessmen first and artists second. One can't imagine them risking bankruptcy to get a film made, as Coppola and Scorcese, their '70s movie brat brethren, have done. Lucas and Spielberg don't have the right to complain about studios focusing on the bottom line, considering how clearly they're focused on their own.