Indie film: What's going wrong?

In all the coverage of the writers' strike in Hollywood, and the beginning of the annual soothsaying frenzy about which films are likely to win Oscars, one potentially very alarming trend in US cinema-going has been largely overlooked: the indie market has been in freefall. The most challenging and often the best-reviewed films of the autumn have all – almost without exception – done lousy business.

It is an instructive, if dispiriting, experience to compare the reviewers' glowing quotes with the grim box-office grosses. Start with Andrew Dominik's $30m The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. According to many pundits, this is the greatest Western since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, way back in 1992. "A ravishing, magisterial, poetic epic... a magnificent throwback," enthused Variety of Dominik's slow-burning drama about the killing of the legendary cowboy. The film had Brad Pitt (in theory, one of Hollywood's cynosures) in the title role, and the might of Warner Bros behind it. None the less, it has barely made $4m (paltry takings for a film of this stature) at the US box-office.

In the case of The Assassination..., there may be some mitigating circumstances. Rumours abound of spats between the director, star and studio. The film was shot two years ago and has had an immensely uncomfortable gestation. Clearly, not everybody wanted it to succeed. Dominik can at least console himself that his film is likely to acquire classic status, even if its commercial performance has been catastrophic.

What is worrying is that The Assassination... is not an isolated case. There have been several other equally highly praised movies that have been shunned in the same way by American cinemagoers. Take Sean Penn's Into the Wild. Again, the film has sent certain reviewers into raptures ("spellbinding" proclaimed the influential Roger Ebert) without luring audiences into multiplexes in meaningful numbers. The film, released by Paramount Vantage, has now stuttered to around $15m at the US box office.

And what about Things We Lost in the Fire? This high-profile studio movie, starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro, has a title that seems like a morbid joke. With a current US box-office gross of less than $4m, Things We Lost in the Fire might as well have spontaneously combusted. It opened on 1,100 screens, but next to no one went to see it.

The list of underperformers goes on and on: Elizabeth: the Golden Age, Rendition, We Own the Night, The Kingdom, Revolutionary Road and Gone Baby Gone... Certain titles, for example Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, were panned by reviewers, but others were warmly received. It didn't seem to make any difference.

James Schamus, the chief executive of Focus Features (the specialist arm of Universal), describes this autumn as "a massive pile-up, crash, death zone, bloodbath experience" for distributors trying to release specialist films (in other words, non-franchise movies). The question these grim box-office statistics provoke is just why so many seemingly strong films, as well as the critical duds, are being treated with such disdain by American cinemagoers.

One of the obvious problems is that the films have been cannibalising each other's audiences. Industry wisdom has it that autumn is the best time to release movies that stand a chance of Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. As Schamus puts it: "Everybody in the business wants an Oscar, and everybody believes that in order to do that, you have to release in the Fall."

Perhaps too much money has been swilling about in the industry. There has been an influx of new investors into US movies who are ready to back projects that the studios would probably have shunned. Billionaires looking for new ways of spending their money find the film business alluring. For example, Participant Productions (the outfit behind Good Night, and Good Luck and An Inconvenient Truth) was set up by the eBay tycoon Jeff Skoll. Brokeback Mountain, Lust, Caution, Fur and Into the Wild were all backed by River Road Entertainment, a Minneapolis-based film company run by William M Pohlad, who comes from a wealthy banking family. In a recent New York Times article, Penn likened Pohlad to a modern-day Medici: "He's the first producer I've worked with where I am the one to bring up the money issues."

With such patrons, film-makers have been allowed to make deeply personal movies that don't always make concessions to audiences. Many of the autumn movies have been very, very long. They have also been very, very dark. As the producer Mark Gill told The Los Angeles Times last month: "It is certainly getting harder and harder to market a film if, at the end, you're left with a sinking feeling in your stomach."

The armchair sociologists have already been out in force, suggesting that US audiences, aware that their economy may be going into freefall, want entertainment, not sermonising. However, generalisations about audiences not being prepared to sit through lengthy, self-important movies on weighty themes don't always stack up. The same audiences who have been ignoring everything else rushed to see Ridley Scott's American Gangster, which has now passed $100m after only three weeks on general release. Its success came as a big relief to an industry currently enduring a severe crisis of confidence, but hardly makes up for the other failures.

The studios themselves have contributed to the glut of "specialised" films that now fill the market. They all have their "speciality" divisions, looking for the latest breakout hit. The competition is intense, but this year there has been little that has warmed audiences in the way that Fox Searchlight did with Little Miss Sunshine last year. By now, it ought to be clear which are going to be this year's "breakout" hits, but there is no sign of anything to match The Queen or Paul Haggis' Crash on the horizon.

Indeed, Haggis' most recent film, In the Valley of Elah, has sunk at the US box-office in spite of a magisterial performance from Tommy Lee Jones as the woebegone father searching for his son, a soldier back from Iraq who has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, Adrienne Shelly's wonderful comedy Waitress, which Fox Searchlight bought amid much fanfare at Sundance in the hope that it would be this year's Little Miss Sunshine, has stalled on a worldwide gross of around $20m – only a fifth of what Little Miss Sunshine made.

Even Steven Spielberg (who helped to pioneer the idea of "tentpole movies") has been known to complain about "the hysteria and nail-biting anxiety" before any film opens, and the way that movies are so often judged on the results of their first weekend. The idea of releasing a film quietly and slowly allowing an audience to build is rarely accepted. Too often, the film is either a hit on Monday morning (when the weekend box-office figures are released) or pronounced dead on arrival.

As ever, some context is needed. Hollywood has always worked on the basis that the occasional huge success pays for the many routine failures. Even so, the dependence on those blockbusters (whether Beowulf or The Golden Compass) is becoming ever stronger. "There has been a strong erosion of film attendance," points out Ben Stassen, the boss of 3D movie company nWave Pictures (whose new feature Fly Me to the Moon is being given a major US release next year.) "If it were not for the blockbusters of the summer, the industry would be in terrible shape."

So where is the upside? The films that have been performing so abysmally at the US box-office may still redeem themselves overseas. The international marketplace has become increasingly important to Hollywood studios. And, when the award nominations are announced, films that seemed like pariahs on their initial release may suddenly acquire a new popularity.

Notwithstanding the challenges posed by new technology and the new viewing habits of younger audiences (who are as likely to download their movies as to watch them in the cinemas), the autumn downturn is likely to be temporary. That, at least, is what the industry is hoping. "You know what, it will shake out. It has just been an unfortunate traffic jam," says Schamus. "These are good movies. At the end of the day, it's a problem where we probably have just too many good movies hitting the market at the same time."

One constant complaint is that Hollywood no longer makes movies like it did in the halcyon days of the early 1970s, when such titles as Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather, Taxi Driver and The Last Picture Show were produced in quick succession. The irony is that future generations may see the current era as almost equally rich.

Films from directors with strong personal vision are again being made in abundance, and Hollywood is ready to tackle issues of social and political import. Even the truisms about Hollywood endings no longer always apply: many of the films released this autumn have ended bleakly. There is great work being made. It's just a pity that no one is going to see it.

'The Assassination of Jesse James' opens in the UK on 30 November