Adam Fogelson, the chairman of Hollywood’s newest studio, listened to a pitch for a film called “Unmanned” with an encouraging smile. Hollywood pitches are jolly, elaborately courteous affairs. So on this sunny afternoon the filmmakers—two producers, the director, and the star, Keanu Reeves, whose black suit and black T-shirt and black beard gave him the look of a stylish sexton—had cheerfully trekked over the hill to STX Entertainment’s offices in Burbank, and STX’s executives had cheerfully welcomed them with a bottomless supply of bottled water.

Chris Morgan, one of the producers, explained that “Unmanned,” an action film about a global war set in 2033, was really “ ‘Saving Private Ryan’ five minutes in the future.” Reeves would play Bellam, a discredited soldier who must go behind enemy lines in Hong Kong to rescue his younger brother, Royce. The film’s hook was that every soldier has an “ape”—a robot sidekick that accompanies him into battle and mimics his habits. To find Royce, Bellam would have to forge an unlikely bond with Royce’s ape. As in almost every Hollywood film about a dystopian future, humanity would outfox and outfeel the machines.

Fogelson’s face was a mask of amenability. At forty-eight, he is neither young nor old, neither tall nor short, neither trendy nor mainstream. Pleasantly handsome and immensely competitive, he strives to remain imperturbable and, as he likes to say, “laser focussed.” Yet he’s a hugger, grateful for any true sincerity or passion in a town dedicated to fabricating both. Though he’d never volunteer this in a meeting, his strongest motivation is his fear of dying without leaving some monument behind. (As a boy, he burst into tears whenever he passed a cemetery.) His supporters admire his humor and his contradictions; his detractors find him arrogant. In a sense, he embodies the movie business he hopes to dominate: calculating, impulsive, hard-nosed, and hopeful.

Morgan rolled a five-minute “sizzle reel,” essentially a trailer for an unmade film. Made by the prospective director, Tim Webber, who was the visual-effects supervisor on “Gravity” and “Avatar,” it comprised bits from twenty-three films, as well as from commercials for video games. Reeves’s voice-over—“War is pain . . . you hurt them, they hurt you”—created a mournful mood, and the editing was propulsive: shots of Royce’s ape flicking a lighter the way Royce did, intercut with battle scenes and closeups of Reeves and other actors looking weary and defiant.

Pitch meetings, rife with sucking up and bogus fervor, are among Fogelson’s least favorite executive tasks. When the lights came on after the sizzle reel, he said, “I was thinking, Please, God, don’t let me have to fake enthusiasm—and that was the best version of that kind of thing I have ever seen! I love the wish fulfillment, the idea that, even after technology takes over, a human brain and a human soul still matter.”

“This is about brothers,” Webber said. “It’s about people!” Reeves rubbed his palms as if starting a fire.

Fogelson suspects that filmmakers will agree with any opinion he offers in order to get a green light, so he lets them describe the film they really intend to make, then trusts his gut about whether it sounds commercial. Choosing which movies to make is the crux of his job, the hundred-million-dollar decision. When he was eight, his father, the head of marketing at Columbia Pictures, told him, “You need a clear good guy and a clear bad guy, and the audience needs to know what it’s rooting for.” “Unmanned” satisfied that injunction. But one of Fogelson’s own rules is “Only make a film you already know how to sell.” Having come up as a marketer at Universal Pictures, which he ran from 2009 to 2013, Fogelson believes that seventy-five per cent of a movie’s success is due to its marketing and its marketability. One of his biggest bombs at Universal—a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar bloodbath—was “47 Ronin,” which starred Reeves, regrettably, as a samurai warrior. Nonetheless, Fogelson believed he could sell Reeves here by positioning him as the kind of reluctant hero that he had played in “The Matrix.”

“What do you think you can make it for?” Fogelson asked. The line producer answered, “We haven’t done an absolute budget. And for the battle portions we still have to find a preëxisting, slightly tropical Asian-feel locale that looks not exactly bombed-out. But . . . fifty, sixty?” Fogelson glanced at his No. 2, Oren Aviv, who narrowed his eyes. The script called for “the largest naval armada gathered since the Second World War,” among other showstoppers, which would run well above sixty million dollars.

“Unmanned” was going to have to change to fit STX’s model—the origin story that explained to investors how the company would reinvent the Hollywood formula. The six major studios, besieged by entertainment options that don’t require people to get off the couch, have bet that the future lies in films that are too huge to ignore. Although they make low-budget films for targeted audiences (teen girls, say, or horror fans), they focus most of their energies on movies that cost more than three hundred million dollars to make and market. Such films are predicated not on the chancy appeal of individual actors but on “I.P.”—intellectual property, in the form of characters and stories that the audience already knows from books or comics or video games.

These blockbusters are intended to appeal to everyone, everywhere—but they leave many people cold. STX’s founder and C.E.O., Bob Simonds, told me, “There’s a huge vacuum there. And that vacuum is the place you can tell human stories—what I think of as movies.” What had vanished were the kind of character-driven, John Hughes-level films that suck you in on a rainy Saturday morning. So STX was betting on the enduring appeal of movie stars. But they had to be playing the kinds of role that had made them stars. Russell Crowe in “Robin Hood”? Yes. Russell Crowe in “The Water Diviner”? No. And the movies had to be sensibly priced, by current standards: between twenty and eighty million dollars. STX’s internal data showed that such star-showcase films, within that budget range, were profitable thirty per cent more often than the average Hollywood film. So the studio planned to make a lot of them. By 2017, STX expects to release between twelve and fifteen movies a year, as many as some of the major studios.

Though the studio presents itself as the shiny new disrupter, with a lean org chart and business cards printed in English and Mandarin, it’s fuelled by an ancient motivation: proving the other guys wrong. Bob Simonds is a shrewd, preppy fireball who dated Jennifer Beals at Yale, graduated summa cum laude, then made his name as the producer of such Adam Sandler comedies as “Happy Gilmore” and “The Waterboy.” He was offered two studio chairmanships but never a job running the parent company. “Studio chairman sounds so much bigger than it is,” Simonds said. “Somebody gives you the keys to the car—but you can’t fucking take it off-roading.”

In the fall of 2014, he handed his own keys to Adam Fogelson, who also has something to prove: he had left Universal, the year before, because he was fired, and he felt that his ouster was unfair. Simonds told me—as Fogelson sat nearby, frowning responsibly but not demurring—that “Adam led that studio to the three most profitable years in its history, and he’s still suffering from watching the success built on his back.” In 2015, Universal accounted for a whopping twenty-two per cent of the industry’s domestic box-office, largely from films that Fogelson green-lit. “Bob and Adam are the chip-on-the-shoulder guys,” one agent said. “Their brand is ‘We were right, and you should have listened.’ ”