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I didn't mean to be antagonistic. I'm interested in what you say because you seem knowledgeable on the subject. I acknowledge that I started the discussion by misquoting you, and I apologize for that. I genuinely misunderstood you. When I asked my broad question, the kind of long and interesting response you responded with is actually what I was hoping for, so thanks for the information.

You're annoyed that I had a critical response to your long answer, probably stemming from my own ignorance. I don't really see what's wrong with that one. Maybe I'm coming across as less casual than I mean to, because I didn't mean to say anything I wouldn't have said in a casual conversation with someone in real life who was passionate about some subject. I probably should have stressed my own ignorance more in my response, because I meant my response as a question: "How can I reconcile your assertion with X?" Who knows, maybe you would find me annoying in real life.

Anyway, I was not triumphant, and I was not trying to prove you wrong. I was curious.

Clearly I'm misunderstanding what a B-movie and a blockbuster are, and I must have also misunderstood what constitutes a commercial failure in film. Looking at Wikipedia, several of the movies made a box office revenue of more than twice their budget (Her, District 9, Eternal Sunshine, Minority Report, Super 8), and three more were profitable. I naively assumed this would constitute a commercial success, but looking at profits of the IMDB top-rated movies, I see that most have grossed much higher than a multiple of 2. So that is definitely eye opening to me. I'd previously assumed that most of the movies I listed were a success, since they were popular and made money. I'm surrounded by nerds 99% of the time in my life, and among the ones who like movies, they've always considered movies like Children of Men and Blade Runner as if they were equally as successful as movies like The Dark Knight and Pulp Fiction. It makes me a bit sad that this turns out not to be true.

How do you think the movie landscape would look different if Star Wars never existed (assuming we still kept all of its special effects and technical production advances)? More SciFi dramas like The Man From Earth? That would be nice...