How much does it cost to open up a movie studio? Why has no director ever tried it?

Um... director D.W. Griffith was part owner of United Artists studio in the 1920s, there are probably earlier examples of a dire tor turning studio head but that one was huge in its day. (He got forced out of the company later because his movies all lost money.)

Spielberg owns part of DreamWorks Studios today. And the films he directs are all losing money. Hmmm...

There are a few actors who have their own production companies. But, that's not enough. You still need a distributor and movie theater chains willing to show the movie. Highly unlikely because they prefer the big budget films. You also need to promote the film which is expensive. Furthermore, mass media is owned by the same people who own the major studios.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were directors with their own movie studios, but only after they became successful and rich.

i have no special knowledge, but i'd imagine the answer is more or less as keelai layed out above. there are lots of things that only look easy from the outside. you have to market the film, get people to know about it, and have the means of getting in on screens and streaming sites and so on.

and even if you have the personal resources to put something like that together, it's still an enormous risk to do so. it's been a while since i read up on this, so someone correct me if this is off, but i believe well over half of all films released don't make their budget back, and most of the ones that do make money only do so in the slimmest of ways. the movie industry is mostly subsidized by a few over-performing films. i don't think that's totally unique to movies either. i think book publishing operates under somewhat similar methods.

even if you're doing a small budget film, a $100k movie, that's still a lot of money to almost every person, and once you add in the costs of getting it marketed and distributed, you're looking at a small fortune to get something like that done, with no guarantee you'll get any return on that - more likely you'll never see any profit on it, in fact.

I think Coppola did with American Zoetrope. It made some classic movies, mostly in the 70s.

Contrary to popular believes, most directors are basically terrible when they were given totally free reigns. Let face it, directors, just like most other creative people are more or less eccentrics, have big egos and can't give objective judgement of their own products. Given their own studio, money and everything probably lots of them will do what Tommy Wiseau did.

Studio execs and producers are there to guide these artistic monsters, to put some restrictions and to give them some goals and real world bussiness prespectives, to tame them. Without them, imaginations would run wild and ruin everything into incoherent mess.

As others have mentioned, some have (I'll add Robert Rodriguez and his Troublemaker Studios). But you're taking a lot for granted with the rest of your assumptions -- esp about the idea of "extra profits" as well as thinking no other entity besides your studio would be involved.