>Although it is a huge risk, this is the modus operandi of Hollywood blockbusters, AAA games, and many live acts.

Statistical analysis suggests it is really just the same risk as a small production: 50/50. For every Avatar, there is a Waterworld.

>While it's true that you don't have a definite formula for success, the quality of the result is a thing you can control for in some degree just by hiring people with a track record(another avenue of capital: buy the visible superstars), and then providing them with this marketing infrastructure to work within.

That, too, has been extensively studied. For every star-studded mega-hit, there is a star-studded mega-flop... and a mega-hit populated only by unknown first-time actors. Once you look at all the data, there really isn't anything you can do to budge the needle. Big stars will not increase your chances of success. Big budgets will not increase your chances of acclaim. The only studies that have shown actual predictive power before the release of a media property dealt with Tweets sent within 48 hours of the public release. And obviously, it is quite a bit too late at that point to make funding decisions. This fact isn't new, history is littered with tales that show that even those whose sole career it is to spot and publish successful works have horrendous track records. I just read last night that in the 1970s, the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was submitted over 200 times to publishers and once someone did agree to publish it, they expected to make no money on it. It almost instantly became the best-selling philosophy book of all time. Not even the most stellar hit can be spotted beforehand.

The book 'A Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' has a couple chapters about this and I think explains it quite well. The main issue is that the audience is never the same. If a film hits the theater this week versus next week, the available audience is fundamentally just not the same people. Few people go to the theater every single week, so your ability to really nail the tastes of the audience of this weekend won't help you if you release the following weekend. They back this up with research, specifically including research about the factors you mentioned like star power, production budget, etc. The publishing industry has always been ruled by superstition because that's how human beings respond when put in a position of total randomness. They will say that certain publishing companies CEO is a 'tastemaker' and 'knows what the people want'... analysis, however, shows that the CEOs who had this reputation were actually benefitting from the success of projects started under the tenure of the prior CEO, then when the projects they themselves backed got made and didn't perform as well, they "hit a cold streak", left, then the next exec started getting credit for their later projects, and the cycle repeats itself. If you're in that industry and looking to make a career, it's hard to build upon an honest "well, I will roll the dice and hope for the best", so fanciful mythmaking is essentially encouraged.

I'm not aware of research specifically controlling for the random response of the public and examining the influence of marketing alone. It would be interesting to see. A battle for peoples attention is absolutely what it boils down to once the publishers lose control of distribution and can no longer meaningfully restrict what options the audience has which was always their primary means of ensuring a positive return despite random outcomes from each individual effort.