The average "studio" film today costs tens of millions of dollars, while the average "independent" film exists in a range below $10 million. Such expenditures under both headings have little to do with the genre of film being made, the length of the film, or even the stars of the film in many cases. Many stars will work for less money in an independent film than they will for a studio-made film--Bruce Willis appears in the $7 million Pulp Fiction, for instance, while he is usually paid more than that personally for studio-made films like the two Die Hard sequels. The quality of the film produced also bears only some relationship to the amount of money spent--the aforementioned Pulp Fiction was well-received by critics and audiences alike, while a film costing $70 or $80 million such as Daylight was denigrated by critics and ignored by audiences. What is important is that the money be spent well by the filmmakers and create a film people want to see, and even then the film may not find an audience. Gridlock'd is an independent film with a strong sense of time and place and with an unusual subject matter handled well, yet it did not find an audience. Absolute Power is a studio-produced film whose director and star, Clint Eastwood, did a generally good job at creating an understandable and well-directed thriller with many millions more in the budget, and in this case the film has found an audience. The financing of these two pictures was clearly accomplished under different circumstances and with somewhat different requirements in the same marketplace, and both films show directors who are very good at dealing with their actors.
The financing of the studio film, though involving far more money, would have been easier to accomplish in this case given first that the novel on which the film is based was a best-seller and so would have a high degree of audience identification and second because Clint Eastwood was interested in mak...