Logan Lucky cost a relatively modest $29 million—thanks in part to Soderbergh’s allure as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, which means the all-star cast was willing to work for scale rather than demand their normal salaries. Hollywood is increasingly shying away from making such smaller-budget movies, as multi-year franchises have become the financial norm for multi-national conglomerates looking to move the stock-market needle with each big release. But producing a film for $29 million is a lot easier than distributing it wide; the latter usually requires the participation of a major studio, to the chagrin of many artists like Soderbergh.

The director has previously noted his fury at the marketing of his 2002 sci-fi drama Solaris, a mid-budget film that was pitched to audiences as a steamy romance (a bizarre poster focused on stars George Clooney and Natascha McElhone mid-kiss). The film bombed. When Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013, he said directors had been robbed of all the creative freedom they once enjoyed, in the name of profit. “It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen, to put it bluntly,” he said.

Had Soderbergh gone to a major studio with Logan Lucky, it would have exercised total control over marketing (spending an additional tens of millions of dollars) in exchange for 15 percent of ticket sales and all other expenses, with any remaining profits going to the film’s owners. Instead, Soderbergh raised $20 million in marketing money by selling the movie’s non-theatrical rights (Amazon bought the streaming rights), then cut a deal with the smaller distributor Bleecker Street Media to market the film for only $1 million in exchange for a much smaller slice of profits.

This means Logan Lucky doesn’t have to aim for the kind of inflated opening weekends that major studios crave, which require an intense promotional blitz and a fairly homogenous, and costly, creative strategy. Soderbergh created the film’s trailer himself and never tested it with audiences (usually, trailers are created by marketing firms and intensely focused-grouped). He has also concentrated billboard advertising in the South and Midwest, where he thinks the movie could have mass appeal (usually, advertising is centered on the country’s biggest cities).

It’s a fascinating effort worthy of a director who has worked in every level of the industry, making pricy star vehicles like Ocean’s Eleven and tiny experimental features like 2005’s Bubble, which was released in theaters and on television simultaneously (years before Netflix adopted a similar strategy). Soderbergh’s approach does away with the need for massive grosses—a modest $15 million opening weekend, which would usually be seen as disappointing for most wide releases, is more than enough (according to the Times’s reporting) to satisfy everyone’s financial commitments in the case of Logan Lucky.