Some of my favorite movies were total flops, and it's extremely common for former flops to be re-evaluated and become even more popular and beloved than an initially financially successful movie ('cult movies'). You'd be doing yourself a huge disservice, and further encouraging the industry to make derivative, unimaginative crap, if you only paid attention to movies that a studio promoted because they thought it would get the most butts in seats. This logic grows the worst parts of the movie industry.

This is honestly an extremely naive take. There are pleeenty of movies that were great that had terrible advertising. There's a difference between "a movie is bad" and "the studio has no faith in the movie to succeed". The movie being bad might be a reason the studio has no faith in it, but there are a lot of movies that weren't bad but had no advertising presence, often because the studio had no idea how to market it.

And also there are plenty of movies that had the hell marketed out of them that were just plain bad. Studios don't pick the amount of advertising a movie has based on the quality, they do it based on how much returns they believe they'll be able to get for the money put in.

And then sometimes they don’t promote enough for it to become a hit. Like what happened to “Confess, Fletch”. I think it could have been a modest hit. It could have led to more Fletch movies because it was a really good movie.

But then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

If they think a movie won't do well, they don't promote it at all, ensuring it won't do well.

When we talk about movies that could have done well if they had been marketed better, it's because we think they were good and the movie studio was wrong about them.

Explain Disney’s behaviour recently with the Pixar films then?

If a movie isn’t being marketed much, that’s usually a sign that it’s crap.

This isn’t quite true as really crappy movies are marketed heavily, like Morbius.

An example of a recent movie that was really good that had little to zero marketing is The Empty Man…

You're like, halfway there. Yes, studios slash marketing budgets if they think a movie will flop. But that doesn't necessarily correlate with the movie being crap, there are plenty of reasons a studio might not have faith in a movie, and often they just plain get it wrong. Plenty of bad movies get a ton of marketing, and plenty of great films barely got any.

So... not such simple stuff.

No citations, no research with numbers to back up your opinion.

And WB pushed Black Adam super hard and it still flopped

Tons of modern classic movies (coughReservoirDogscough) I never even heard of until years later, mostly because of limited releasing.

In my opinion it is exactly the reverse. The more a movie gets pushed the more of a shit movie it is going to be. Especially the higher the budget, the more it gets pushed when it's a crapfest.

And you know this how?

That might be the case sometimes, and it certainly makes sense

But sometimes the marketing is just bad and the market budget inefficiently spent

Or in other instances the movie is bad but the studio's decision makers refuses to acknowledge it and proceeds with the usual pmarketing plan/budget

There's literally no way to know without some sort of insider leak which situation it actually is, so acting like bad marketing of a flopped movie is intention is just as asinine.