<P> By 1990, the cost of the average U.S. film had passed $25 million . Of the nine films released that year to gross more than $100 million at the U.S. box office, two would have been strictly B movie material before the late 1970s: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Dick Tracy . Three more--the science - fiction thriller Total Recall, the action - filled detective thriller Die Hard 2, and the year's biggest hit, the slapstick kiddie comedy Home Alone--were also far closer to the traditional arena of the Bs than to classic A-list subject matter . The growing popularity of home video and access to unedited movies on cable and satellite television along with real estate pressures were making survival more difficult for the sort of small or non-chain theaters that were the primary home of independently produced genre films . Drive - in screens were rapidly disappearing from the American landscape . </P> <P> Surviving B movie operations adapted in different ways . Releases from Troma now frequently went straight to video . New Line, in its first decade, had been almost exclusively a distributor of low - budget independent and foreign genre pictures . With the smash success of exploitation veteran Wes Craven's original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), whose nearly $2 million cost it had directly backed, the company began moving steadily into higher - budget genre productions . In 1994, New Line was sold to the Turner Broadcasting System; it was soon being run as a midsized studio with a broad range of product alongside Warner Bros. within the Time Warner conglomerate . The following year, Showtime launched Roger Corman Presents, a series of thirteen straight - to - cable movies produced by Concorde--New Horizons . A New York Times reviewer found that the initial installment qualified as "vintage Corman...spiked with everything from bared female breasts to a mind - blowing quote from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice ." </P> <P> At the same time as exhibition venues for B films vanished, the independent film movement was burgeoning; among the results were various crossovers between the low - budget genre movie and the "sophisticated" arthouse picture . Director Abel Ferrara, who built a reputation with violent B movies such as The Driller Killer (1979) and Ms. 45 (1981), made two works in the early nineties that marry exploitation - worthy depictions of sex, drugs, and general sleaze to complex examinations of honor and redemption: King of New York (1990) was backed by a group of mostly small production companies and the cost of Bad Lieutenant (1992), $1.8 million, was financed totally independently . Larry Fessenden's micro-budget monster movies, such as No Telling (1991) and Habit (1997), reframe classic genre subjects--Frankenstein and vampirism, respectively--to explore issues of contemporary relevance . The budget of David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), $10 million, was not comfortably A-grade, but it was hardly B - level either . The film's imagery was another matter: "On its scandalizing surface, David Cronenberg's Crash suggests exploitation at its most disturbingly sick", wrote critic Janet Maslin . Financed, like King of New York, by a consortium of production companies, it was picked up for U.S. distribution by Fine Line Features . This result mirrored the film's scrambling of definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire--specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor's arthouse division . Pulp Fiction (1994), directed by Quentin Tarantino on a $8.5 million budget, became a hugely influential hit by crossing multiple lines, as James Mottram describes: "With its art house narrative structure, B - movie subject matter and Hollywood cast, the film is the axis for three distinct cinematic traditions to intersect ." </P> <P> By the turn of the millennium, the average production cost of an American feature had already spent three years above the $50 million mark . In 2005, the top ten movies at the U.S. box office included three adaptations of children's fantasy novels, one extending and another initiating a series (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, respectively), a child - targeted cartoon (Madagascar), a comic book adaptation (Batman Begins), a sci - fi series installment (Star Wars: Episode III--Revenge of the Sith), a sci - fi remake (War of the Worlds), and a King Kong remake . It was a slow year for Corman: he produced just one movie, which had no American theatrical release, true of most of the pictures he had been involved in over the preceding decade . As big - budget Hollywood movies further usurped traditional low - rent genres, the ongoing viability of the familiar brand of B movie was in grave doubt . New York Times critic A.O. Scott warned of the impending "extinction" of "the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures" of the B picture . </P>

Difference between a b c and d grade movies