Very interesting article on Universal's success this year with a full slate of relatively inexpensive films:This was a bit of an accident - for instance, Fast 7 was meant to be released this summer but was delayed due to the death of Paul Walker. But they ended up with 15 films with budgets mostly in the $5-50 million range, topping out at $70 million for their most expensive film, and made 30% more profit than the previous year. Another interesting thing to note is that only two of the films were sequels.This is counter to what seems to have become the conventional wisdom in hollywood that it's better to go with fewer films and larger budgets, and focusing on huge franchises over individual, original films. This trend has been cited frequently as wiping out a lot of the mid-range productions (good article on this here: http://flavorwire.com/492985/how-th...-generation-of-iconic-filmmakers-mia/view-all ).It'll be interesting to see if this influences any of the other big studios to re-evaluate the wisdom of betting everything on huge summer blockbusters. With the huge wave of superhero films set to crash into cinemas here over the next few years I'm wondering if we'll see audience fatigue bring about Spielberg's predicted blockbuster implosion - if it happens, Universal's success this year could point the way back to a more varied output for studios in the future.