Producer Bennett Graebner on Why Audiences Choose Sincerity Over Spectacle

Domestic theatrical revenue collapsed to $425 million in October 2025, the worst non-pandemic theatrical month in 27 years. The drop capped a year in which Hollywood's biggest productions hemorrhaged money while $6 million indies and Norwegian-language family dramas claimed top Oscars.

Snow White lost over $200 million for Disney while Sean Baker's Anora swept five Oscars including Best Picture. The Final Reckoning, the latest Mission: Impossible installment, lost roughly $150 million for Paramount despite grossing $595 million globally, while Drew Hancock's Companion grossed nearly $37 million.

Producer and screenwriter Bennett Graebner spent 17 years as showrunner of The Bachelor franchise before stepping back to focus on screenwriting. Bennett Graebner has described a single test for any film: whether the work makes audiences feel something, regardless of budget or star power. The 2025 box office split along exactly that line.

Why Did 2025 Punish Spectacle This Hard?

The "feel something" standard sounds soft until you trace what it forces a writer or producer to deliver. Spectacle alone cannot generate emotional response, regardless of budget. Building any meaningful payoff requires consistent characterization across acts, real stakes the viewer has reason to care about, and dialogue that earns its sentimental moments instead of demanding them.

Disney's Tron: Ares finished its theatrical run at $142 million globally, joining Snow White and The Final Reckoning as 2025 releases that skipped fundamentals while spending heavily on visual scale. Audiences declined to subsidize the math.

The films that connected ran on inverted economics:

• Anora, $6 million budget, five Academy Awards including Best Picture
• Companion, $10 million budget, $36.7 million global gross
• Sentimental Value, won the 2026 Oscar for Best International Feature after a 19-minute Cannes standing ovation
• Marty Supreme, a $70 million Timothée Chalamet dramedy on track to clear $100 million globally

Each was a character piece, none spending on visual scale, all trusting that the people in the frame were reason enough to show up. The financial returns followed, with each project recouping its production cost within weeks of release.

What 2025 Felt Like From the Box Office Floor

Adam Fogelson, who chairs the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, described the 2025 dynamic to Variety in stark terms. When a film catches the audience's imagination, they show up enthusiastically, but when it doesn't, "the floor is non-existent, regardless of the level of star power."

Star power doesn't paper over emotional vacancy. A $400 million Mission: Impossible installment that hedges on emotional stakes will lose to a $6 million indie that doesn't, and that arithmetic held across the year regardless of star power, budget tier, or genre.

What Reality TV Got That Theatrical Forgot

Bennett Graebner's Bachelor production ran on the opposite economics of theatrical spectacle. With episode budgets a fraction of feature scale and no explosions or CGI to lean on, audience retention came down to whether viewers cared about the people on screen. The work was finding moments that made audiences cry, laugh, or feel embarrassed for someone they had only met three episodes earlier.

That constraint shaped how episodes were structured. Production teams identified contestant moments that would land emotionally and built scenes around them, rather than constructing toward visual reveals or set-piece spectacle.

Bennett Graebner produced 400-plus episodes under that approach. The working motto on his Bachelor sets was "embrace the cheese," shorthand for a commitment to earnest emotion without irony layers.

What Embracing the Cheese Means in Practice

Cheese in this context isn't a synonym for low quality. It refers to a refusal to hedge on emotional stakes, the same instinct that powered romance films of the early 2000s and that drove The Devil Wears Prada 2 to a $77 million domestic opening earlier this month.

The opposite of cheese isn't sophistication; it's hedging, which the 2025 spectacle slate did at scale and which audiences identified and rejected.

Why the Industry Hasn't Repaired Itself

Studios are largely run by executives whose careers were built when star power and IP could carry weak material. The same generation oversaw the 2010s shift toward tentpole-or-microbudget production that hollowed out the mid-budget tier. Snow White's troubled production, Tron: Ares's underperformance, and Marvel's losses on B-team properties suggest that calculation has flipped, but the institutional reflex hasn't caught up.

Internal performance pressure isn't yet sufficient to force change. Quarterly results recover with a single tentpole hit, which buys studio leadership time to keep operating under existing assumptions.

The Tentpole Bias

The mid-budget film, the historical home of character-driven drama and romantic comedy, has been the casualty of the spectacle bet. Hollywood now produces tentpoles or microbudget indies with little in between, and viewers who grew up on mid-budget emotional storytelling have spent two decades being underserved.

Smaller indies have absorbed some of the demand, the surprise crossover hit The Devil Wears Prada 2 absorbed more, and Sony, Searchlight, and Focus Features still produce within the category at output far below what audiences are buying. Filmmakers who want to work in the mid-budget space often turn to independent financing with theatrical distribution arranged afterward.

What 2026 Has to Prove

The Devil Wears Prada 2's $233 million global opening earlier this month shows audiences will respond to the right material at theatrical scale, and the smaller successes of Anora and Companion show the same pattern at budgets a fraction of what failed. What the films that crossed in 2025 had in common wasn't budget tier or genre but the willingness to commit to emotional stakes audiences could feel.

The harder question is structural. Studios built two decades of slate decisions around recognizable IP and known faces, and the resulting portfolio of half-finished tentpoles and signed talent deals won't reverse course quickly. Whether enough studio leadership reads 2025 as a pattern rather than as a one-year anomaly will determine how much of the next two years looks like Snow White and how much looks like Anora.

Bennett Graebner returned to the scripted side this year, including a mid-budget romcom, the kind of project Hollywood produced reliably until roughly 2015 and largely abandoned after.