As they go on to say, it isn’t just about adult films but the whole industry being risk averse:

“You don’t get fired for doing a sequel or an origin story, something that already exists,” Linklater comments, when asked whether studios fear risk-taking for commercial reasons.

“You don’t get in trouble for what’s obvious and commercial. What changed is that films got greenlit by the marketing department and then it’s become really safe choices.

The trouble for Hollywood is that all these franchise films are under-performing. It used to be they could throw a few hundred million dollars at one and they’d make bank, now it is less certain. Deadpool and Wolverine will do well but most others are making a loss. We’ll see what kinds of business Alien: Romulus and Joker 2 do later in the year (the latter should be a big hit if they haven’t dropped the ball).

Meanwhile, Hit Man was made for less than $9M and sold to Netflix for $20M, plus it is getting great reviews. Not so long ago studios would be happy to put out a lot of these a year because the budget meant they only needed one or two hits to do well. Of course, the main company doing this was Miramax… However, I could see the pendulum swinging back towards cheaper but riskier films, it just needs production and distribution firms with a good eye for quality and that seems rarer than it should be.