It seems like the studios are either making giant blockbusters, or really super-small indies. And the mid-level films I grew up on, like ’Back to the Future’ and all those John Hughes movies, the studios aren’t doing. It’s hard to get them on their feet.

Evans is lamenting the “missing middle” in contemporary studio filmmaking: the decline of moderately budgeted, broadly accessible commercial movies that aren’t franchise spectacles but also aren’t micro-budget art-house projects. By invoking 1980s touchstones like Back to the Future and John Hughes’s teen comedies, he points to a period when studios regularly backed mid-range, star-driven, original stories aimed at wide audiences. His comment suggests that current economics—risk aversion, global box-office pressures, and the dominance of IP—make it difficult for such films to secure financing, marketing, and distribution, leaving fewer mainstream opportunities for character-focused, standalone storytelling.