CM’s Reviews > Film History: An Introduction > Status Update

For most countries, the best rewards lay in building service facilities for international production (especially Hollywood’s) and making a few
successful domestic films each year. The highest-quality ones could find exposure on the growing festival circuit, which might lead to theatrical sales.

[Continued]
An industry producing many films had a chance of producing some good, even great ones. In Europe subsidies, investments, and international support kept the number of releases robust. Out of the churn emerged hundreds of films that added immensely to the artistic heritage of cinema.

Whatever the strategy, the economic outcome was the same. At the end of the 2000s, nearly all European filmmakers had failed to beat Hollywood in their domestic markets, win audiences in adjacent territories, or expand their niche in the United States. A cynic might conclude that the millions of euros spent on thousands of European films were wasted. Yet Hollywood had long proven that quantity boosted quality.

This quote is just gold...

When Paramount Pictures asked Francis Ford Coppola to
make a film based on the novel The Godfather, he was in
despair. “They want me to direct this hunk of trash,” he
told his father. “I don’t want to do it. I want to do art
films.”