Wealth & Money Quote by Atom Egoyan

Egoyan is poking at a peculiarly modern form of movie literacy: audiences have been trained to read a budget the way you read a nutrition label. The “odd notion” isn’t just that people like spectacle; it’s that they want proof of purchase. If a film cost $5 million, the expectation is that the screen should function like a receipt - every dollar made visible as production value, scale, gloss, crowds, explosions, period detail. The subtext is quietly accusatory: we’ve smuggled a consumer mindset into an art form and then mistaken it for taste.

What makes the line land is its deadpan inversion of what cinema historically promised. Movies once offered alchemy: the ability to conjure enormity from suggestion, to make a room feel like a world. Egoyan’s phrasing frames the budget-as-image demand as a category error, as if money and meaning are interchangeable. They aren’t. A $5 million film can look “cheap” if it’s investing in performance, atmosphere, or formal risk - things the camera captures, but the marketplace doesn’t easily monetize as “visible.”

Context matters: Egoyan comes out of a tradition of art cinema where restraint is a feature, not a failure. His films trade in ambiguity, memory, and emotional aftershock. That sensibility clashes with an industry that increasingly sells movies through their price tag, and an audience conditioned by franchises and streaming thumbnails to equate cost with competence. The barb here is that we’ve started watching with an accountant’s eye, and calling it realism.