How many movies could you make for the budget of ‘Grown Ups’?

As the colourfully-worded graph above demonstrates, the cost of making a mainstream Hollywood movie -- like Adam Sandler’s critically-derided 2010 comedy “Grown Ups,” for example -- has gone up considerably in recent years.

The Sandler film, which features very little in the way of visual effects or explosive action set pieces, somehow cost around $80 million to produce. Of course, "Grown Ups" brought in around $270 million in box office earnings, which means that Adam Sandler can demand higher budgets for his productions, but $80 million still seems very steep.

It’s an even more astonishing number when you consider how many critically-acclaimed, low-budget movies were produced for that same price.

For the cost of one "Grown Ups" (one of the most critically-reviled films of the past five years) you could make "Juno," "Drive," "Lost in Translation," "500 Days of Summer," "Little Miss Sunshine," "Don Jon," "Shaun of the Dead," "50/50," "End of Watch," "Moon," "Paranormal Activity," "Napoleon Dynamite," "Saw," and "Our Idiot Brother," and still have $5.2 million left over! You could make four “Rocky” films ($1 million budget) and five “Mad Max” movies ($200,000 budget) with those extra millions.

Hollywood productions are increasingly finding themselves put into one of two categories: low-budget movies (films that cost between $1 million and $10 million to produce) or tentpoles (films that cost at least $50 million to produce). Movies in the former category are usually indie dramas or horror flicks, designed to easily make their money back (and then some) and distributed by studios at little cost. Movies in the latter category, however, represent a huge financial investment -- so much so that only the major studios are even capable of producing them. Tentpoles are high risk, high reward ventures that cost a boatload and have to earn mega bucks at the box office to considered a success.

But what about the $10 million to $40 million range? Isn’t that a category, too? Well, it used to be.

In 2013, only three of the Top 20 highest-grossing films cost less than $40 million to make (“We’re The Millers,” “The Conjuring,” and “Identity Thief”) -- and all of those movies cost upwards of $20 million when things like marketing costs are factored in. Compare that to 1993, when almost all of the Top 20 highest grossing films cost less than $30 million to make, and you begin to see how the mid-budget Hollywood film is increasingly an an endangered species.

These mid-range films cost enough to put a major dent in a studio’s bank balance, but they don't cost enough to be able to afford the requisite stars and visual effects that most tentpoles require to turn a profit.

Take James Cameron’s seminal 1986 sci-fi action film “Aliens.” As one Redditor recently illustrated, the movie cost around $18.5 million to make (about $40 million in today’s dollars). It was a big budget by mid-1980s standards, but if you pitched a $20 million science fiction action movie to a major studio these days, you'd be laughed out of their offices. Even a $40 million dollar sci-fi movie would be nearly impossible to greenlight.

With almost no middle ground between the two extremes -- $100 million blockbuster or a $1 million indie rom-com? -- it's no wonder that so many high-profile filmmakers are turning to television to get more creatively risky projects made. TV is where that $10 million to $40 million budget range actually still exists, and an entire season's worth of episodes can be produced for that cost.

With ever-growing blockbuster movie budgets showing no signs of coming down to earth any time soon, it's going to take a major box office crash to bring the modest movie budget back into vogue. For now, the creative exodus to TV will continue.