by Jeff Purser
For years, Hollywood believed one simple equation. The bigger the budget, the bigger the audience. The bigger stars equal bigger box office results. The bigger spectacle, the bigger success. The problem is audiences never signed that contract.
As someone who has spent more than two decades producing films, including Fat Pizza and Cedar Boys, I think we are witnessing a subtle but significant shift. Audiences are becoming less impressed by scale alone and more interested in stories that feel authentic, surprising and emotionally honest.
That does not mean blockbuster cinema is dead, in fact we’re far from it. What it does mean is that a $300 million budget is no longer enough to guarantee audiences will buy a ticket. The superhero genre itself offers a warning. For more than a decade it seemed like an infallible formula. Today, several high-profile releases have fallen well short of expectations, proving that brand recognition alone is no longer enough to carry a film. Look at this past weekend’s Masters of the Universe release, making a soft $54 million globally against a nearly $200 million budget, or the recent Star Wars instalment, The Mandalorian and Grogu, underperforming at $294 global box office to date, against a budget likely double that number.
Meanwhile, independent productions continue to surprise the industry. Recent successes like Backrooms and Obsession have shown that audiences will embrace original ideas, even when they arrive without enormous marketing budgets or household names. It’s by no means a new phenomenon but is certainly becoming a bigger trend in the industry that we can’t ignore.
The thing is, history has been trying to teach Hollywood the same lesson for decades.
The Blair Witch Project was made for around US$60,000 and went on to earn almost US$250 million worldwide. Paranormal Activity reportedly cost just US$15,000 and generated more than US$190 million globally. Napoleon Dynamite became a cultural phenomenon on a shoestring budget. Jordan Peele’s Get Out turned a US$4.5 million investment into more than US$250 million at the box office and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. More recently, Everything Everywhere All at Once proved that an unconventional story could capture audiences and win Best Picture without relying on franchise recognition or superhero spectacle.
The pattern is difficult to ignore. Audiences do not buy budgets; they buy genuine storytelling. This is something I have become increasingly fascinated by.
My latest book, YES YES YES: The Persuasion Playbook, explores the psychology of why people say yes. While it is written through the lens of business and persuasion, the same principles apply to filmmaking, and I’ve injected my experience on film sets and getting movies made into some of my theories.
The reality is, every movie must make a sale before the opening scene even begins. Long before the lights dim, the audience is standing in an invisible decision room asking themselves one question. Is this worth two hours of my life? They are not comparing production budgets or camera lenses. They are making an emotional prediction. Will this surprise me? Will it move me? Will it make me laugh? Will it show me something I have not seen before?
Movie goers are not buying a ticket, they are buying an experience. This lesson isn’t new, but the industry has seemed to forget.
When I became involved with Fat Pizza, plenty of people underestimated it. It was loud, unapologetically suburban and proudly Australian. It was never trying to imitate Hollywood. It spoke directly to an audience that rarely saw its own world represented on screen. People saw themselves, and when they feel seen, they lean in.
The same was true of Cedar Boys. Some questioned whether a story centred on young Lebanese Australians from western Sydney would resonate beyond that community. Instead, audiences connected because underneath the cultural specificity sat universal themes of family, friendship, ambition and belonging.
Ironically, the more specific the stories became, the more universal they felt. For too long, parts of the industry have assumed broad appeal comes from sanding off the edges and making stories feel as generic as possible. I think the opposite is true.
The films that stay with us are often the ones brave enough to have a point of view. Australia is in a prime position to learn something from this and benefit. We have extraordinary filmmakers and remarkable stories, yet too often projects are assessed by how closely they resemble successful overseas productions rather than by what makes them uniquely Australian. Our competitive advantage has never been scale. It has always been originality, humour and point of view.
For the past decade, I have been developing a feature film about Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion of the world, whose historic victory over Tommy Burns took place in Sydney in 1908.
The project is deeply Australian in many respects, but its themes of resilience, identity and perseverance are universal. Ironically, the development journey has mirrored those themes. It has taken years of persistence, countless setbacks and an unwavering belief in the story before recently securing a significant American producing partner, one that is currently making waves oversees in the upcoming fall festival circuit.
This experience reinforced something I have learned repeatedly throughout my career. The first answer is almost always no and the filmmakers who succeed are usually not the ones who hear yes immediately, rather the ones who keep going after hearing no dozens of times.
Perhaps that is the real lesson from today’s independent success stories. For years, Hollywood believed money persuaded audiences, but audiences have repeatedly told us the opposite.
Buy in does not happen because a studio spends another $100 million. It happens because somewhere between a poster, a trailer, a conversation with a friend and a quiet moment scrolling through a streaming service, someone quietly says to themselves: I’m in.
That tiny internal yes is worth more than any fancy visual effect or Brad Pitt lookalike.
The next great Australian film will not necessarily be the one with the biggest stars or the largest marketing spend, it will be the one that understands its audience well enough to earn that yes.
Because in the end, audiences do not buy movies, they buy stories that make them feel something.
Jeff Purser is an Author and Producer of Fat Pizza and Cedar Boys
