If you are a rabid consumer of news in the cine-osphere, following all the latest tidbits and op-eds on all things film, then you'll likely know of the increasingly precarious state of the mid-budget drama.
What use to be the bulk of any given year's film slate has recently become a more endangered species than the Siberian Tiger. In absence of a wide array of choices for adult cineastes, the movie going public has been left with two radically contrasting options: either see a vapid, glorified pinball machine with a bunch of guys running around in capes saving the world from its ever-present impending doom, or see a post-grad's treatise on the injustice of the current socio-economic system where the emotions are SO REAL, and the issues are SO IMPORTANT. If you feel like anything in between, such as a movie in which its characters have a semblance of real human emotions but isn't too pretentious to realize that works of cinema should engage the audience in an entertaining way, then Hollywood has basically given you the metaphorical middle-finger.
This frustration with the studio system's obstinance towards funding anything outside its narrowly imagined view of what moviegoers are willing to see is felt just as passionately (if not more so) on the creative side of things. Directors with fairly big names (people such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and David Croenberg just to name a few) have found it exceedingly difficult to find funding for their original projects, even in instances when big name actors have been attached to their work and forgo their typical star salaries. In Hollywood's mind, the demand is just not there and the risks are just not worth it, which has made cable television the last bastion of adult-oriented drama.
