Thanks to antitrust court decisions dating back to the 1940s, movie studios like Fox or Warner Bros. aren’t allowed to own movie theaters. But most of the other machinery of moviemaking—development executives, marketing teams, television networks, and (maybe most of all) popular intellectual property—is in-house. Studios pay a lot, and they control a lot.

That system has evolved to privilege a certain kind of movie. “Three to six roughly $200-million-plus movies will determine the health of a major legacy studio in a given year,” says Adam Fogelson, chairman of STX Entertainment’s motion picture group, which has a newly minted distribution deal with Besson’s personal studio and production company, EuropaCorp. “Everything else is filler.”

So who makes cheaper movies? A lot of people, in a bunch of different ways. Here’s a relatively simple one: studio cofinancing. Get a studio to put up a chunk of the budget for a movie and find a private investor or fund to put up the rest. That hedges the studio’s bet, while still giving you access to studio marketing and studio distribution—which is how producers got major, prestige promotional pushes for the cofinanced Birdman and The Revenant.

Completely forgo the legacy studios and things get … well, not sketchier, exactly, but more intricate. These approaches are what used to be more commonly called “independent.” The key thing to remember about them is that production is only part of the cost of making a movie. There’s also marketing and, more importantly, distribution—getting the movie into theaters domestically and internationally. Keep that in your head.

One funding method that sidesteps the system: full-equity financing. That’s when the producers find people willing to invest in a movie against its future performance and use that money to pay for production. Then they sell the movie to a distributor when it’s done—maybe by showing it at festivals like Sundance or Cannes. Or they use more equity to self-finance the release. These tend to be in the sub–$10 ­million budget range; Nocturnal Animals used this model, and so does Paul Thomas Anderson’s current project.

For funding movies between that amount and, like, $100 million, producers have another option: the foreign-sales model. A producer takes a presentation to distributors for other countries—a script, maybe, and images from the film, possibly a trailer or some early footage, all constituting a kind of pitch. If the distributors like it, they sign presale contracts, paying an advance to the producer with a promise to pay the balance on delivery of the movie. Those presale contracts become collateral to take to a bank and get a loan to cover the majority of the budget, say 50 to 80 percent. And all that becomes an inducement to get a financier to put up the rest. Maybe they also get some kind of tax rebate from wherever they’re going to shoot.

If that sounds dicey, three decades ago it was—a way to fund direct-to-video schlock starring D-listers and has-beens. Today, though? Loving structured its financing through foreign sales. John Wick was financed by foreign sales plus equity; once completed and screened for studios, it was bought by Lionsgate. Lionsgate partially financed La La Land, with the rest coming from two partner companies. Plan B developed the script for Moonlight, then partnered with A24 for financing and distribution. Clearly there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to selling art; rather, every studio assembles its own constellation of cooperation. And as risky or haphazard as one of these financing ventures might sound, everyone looks smart if the movie is a hit.