Yeah, but you can still have a successful movie with just advertising online. Look at The Lighthouse, it's a small indie movie with a 4 million dollar budget. It was only shown at 8 theaters on its first weekend and made 500k, then the week after that it expanded out and made another 5 million so far. It'll easily make back its budget/market cost at this point, if it hasn't already. And, the only marketing it really had was two trailers on Youtube, and some articles written about it from crappy movie news sites that got shared to reddit.

I think a lot of movies still have boomers at the helm of marketing, who put all of the money into stupid shit that isn't popular anymore, like billboards and newspaper ads and shit. There's been a lot of movies that had large budgets/marketing resources that either just barely scraped by or bombed, and a lot of the time no one just ever fucking knows what the film is.

Overlord was one of my absolute favorite films of last year, had a budget of 38 million and probably quite a few million for marketing. Except fucking no one heard about it until a few days after it was released in theaters, so it made 40 million back and lost money more than likely, even though it was pretty well received. I saw it twice in the theaters within the first week it was out at two different theaters, and there were about 4-6 other people in the audience with me both times. I could probably go talk with any movie lover and barely any of them would even know what film I'm talking about.

Either that, or all this movie is just being used to fund cocaine and hooker parties that would put John Mcafee to shame.