> The studio didn't spend this money for the heck of it, they spent this money with the hope of recouping their investment.

I wonder if the world would be a better place if we had fewer financial incentives to do things, in general?

> But why would a studio spend hundreds of millions making a blockbuster movie?

Under this hypothetical scenario, I believe there wouldn't be a "studio" in the first place. There could be a group of people who want to express themselves, get famous or do something just for fun, without any direct financial gain. Sure, they wouldn't be able to pull off Avatar 2, but our expectations as consumers would also be different.

I note that production, or developing an idea, is not the same as having the idea. You can't deliberately have an idea by spending money, or have a better idea by spending more money. You can employ people to look at a problem and expect some of them to have reasonably good ideas about it - people who were selected because they already have good ideas in that general area. Then you say "these ideas cost this much money to come up with," as if you made ideas happen by decree. That's not what you did, those ideas were latent. What you did was to get them organized.

The opposite idea is intrinsic motivation, and that artists make art because they love it, and they were going to make the art (or come up with ideas) anyway, even if you didn't pay them. But artists also love having comfortable lifestyles, maybe families, maybe expensive studio equipment, maybe parties. And although you can't force them to care about your project you can certainly bribe them into seeing if they are interested. So you can bring out the ideas that they were supposedly going to have anyway - but might not have been able to have without funding - and you can steer the emphasis of their pre-existing interests around.

Which is to say that creativity and money interact in a weird way, where ideas don't have a cost, but creative focus does.