Quality drop resulting from devotion to “safe” and “cheap”.
I’m not sure it even is a devotion to cheap. I think a lot of major media projects now play everything so safe specifically because they’re so expensive and therefore cannot afford to fail
Which costs more, a decent writer given the time to write a good script or 70 hours of reshoots? The cost is A: to hide the skimming off the top by the studio heads. and B: because the folks calling the shots are so completely out of touch with reality.
You don’t need to invoke corruption or reshoots to explain the costs of these big-budget blockbusters though. They have thousands of people working on them, and… Yeah, hiring thousands of professionals for years of work is going to cost a fucktonne of money. It won’t necessarily make a good film, but it will definitely cost a lot.
