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Both of these were made for less than $10 million. Afterwards, both directors went on to make drastically different films about the same subject, called Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Aliens. Those films cost around $20 million to make. From there, both directors continued to slowly increase their budgets. Jim Cameron spent $70 million on The Abyss, while Spielberg spent a combined $100 million to make E.T. and the first three Indiana Jones films. Cameron didn't get a $100 million budget until Terminator 2, and Spielberg didn't spend that much money on a single film until fucking 2002, when he made Minority Report. And when you think about it, this is exactly how the system should work.

20th Century Fox

When Jim Cameron asks for $200 million to do Dances With Ferngully, it's because he's earned that trust, dammit.

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If you're a first-week cashier at a Hardee's, you aren't expected to run the meth lab in the back by week two. Similarly, if you just made a film called "Elite Squad" for $16 million, you wouldn't expect to be making a Robocop reboot for $130 million. That's a stupid and reckless gamble every time.

And the saddest part isn't that it's ruining the films, but rather the directors who might have otherwise gone on to make great films of their own (to be rebooted 20 years later by a whole new crop of directors). Chronicle was a strong concept that, if followed with a mid-budget film instead of a bloated superhero franchise, might have started a good career instead of imploding it. Gambling with new directors also means gambling with those directors' careers. Consequently, a guy like Alan Taylor might successfully go from TV shows to Thor: The Dark World, but can still ruin Terminator Genisys due to his lack of experience. Gareth Edwards went from a $500,000 indie film to a fucking $160 million Godzilla film in four years, and is now making the next Star Wars movie, even though he only has two previous credits to his name, both of which are giant monster movies.