They’re winning awards, they also made money

Warner Bros has Argo, Universal has Les Miserables, Disney has Lincoln, Fox has Life of Pi and Sony has Zero Dark Thirty. Several of those films were produced with outside financing, but they all benefited from the strong distribution and marketing of a major studio.

It all points to strong health for Hollywood. “The good news is there’s a robust body of movie goers seeing quality films. That’s the real story,” said Peter Guber, the veteran producer and chairman of Mandalay Entertainment who produced the best picture-winning Rain Man, among others.

That idiosyncratic movies by talented filmmakers from Ang Lee to Quentin Tarantino can be so lucrative, albeit not on the scale of the $1.1 billion-making Skyfall, suggests that risk-taking can pay off.

At a time when teenager-targeted extravaganzas increasingly crowd out quality films for adults, this year’s best picture films made the argument for being a little daring.