!Who in their right mind makes that decision as a producer?!<

Business-people obviously and sadly. I mean movies have always been a business first, but since there are now basically only 2 or three large companies left with a much larger share of the income they can much better predict the expected income. Everything becomes more efficient. With thousands of little studios competing each individual project is kind of hustling around at random. It’s hit or miss at random basically. But a small studio wouldn’t do focus-grouping in order to increase a movies financial success. Focus-grouping would be too expensive for a small project. Those things only make sense financially if your movie is fairly large OR your company already has a well oiled marketing-department that focus-groups for basically every movie automatically. But with focus-groups you obviously always aim for what most people like. It’s like the lowest denominator. That’s why so many things feel so boring in marvel/disney-productions. There’s no too room for random happy accidents.

i still have hopes for cinema though, since the incredible rise of the A24 brand in recent years for me is a clear signal that people are fed up with this marvel/disney-monoculture-assembly-line that clogges up the cinemas. One major aspect of the disney-death-star is that Disney basically prevents other productions from materializing. They even prevent their own productions from. materializing as their planning shows them that N large movies a year is about the most they can extract from the movie-going audience. So they will not produce more big budget blockbuster because that would only waste money. Similar with competitors: They know that their big budget movie will have to compete with e.g. Marvels new this-and-that that weekend (or another Disney release at another time) and will not produce a movie. Disney is clogging up the cinemas with their grey goo.

A24 simply made movies that are different and not aimed at everyone. That simple idea was e extremely radical.