How to watch a movie, Part Two

Art thrives wherever it can find a niche audience. Live theater has escaped the shackles of required artistic conformity for the simple reason that each production doesn't need a very large audience to be successful. An off-Broadway show can be happy with 50 paid seats a night. But the audience needed to recoup a hundred-million-dollar movie budget is, what? Twenty million ticket purchasers? More? That’s nobody’s niche.