It doesn’t have anything to do with film as a medium. It’s just that today’s audiences have limited tastes, preferring the mega blockbuster with all the effects and spoon fed plots. Lynch’s audience has moved to paid television and streaming media. There you can have a longer term commitment to tell a more developed story. Shows like Game of Thrones, True Detective, Fargo…etc, would not give enough time to be told on film and would die finanically in theaters. Lynch sees this and knows where to best tell his kind of stories. He’s not the only great director who is seeing the death of cinema and the birth of digital distribution.

Divided reaction isn’t new for him Twin peaks fire walk with me and lost highway did divide people but maybe you are right.It could be something other then finance.

Except that he works for cheap
He doesn’t need big budgets to cover up a lack of creativity

But you do have a point that he doesn’t make big dumb blockbusters

And thats where the big dumb money is at

Becasue he’s an actual auteur
He’s not bound by hollywood politics

hollywood would rather finance a stupider imitation of Lynch to push their political agendas

Lynch is the ACTUAL SUBSTANCE

I’ll watch anything Lynch does before I’ll watch a damn thing by all the false imitations these days like lindelof

Yeah, I dunno about that. I know they’ve never done better than break even at the box office. but no one is really losing money on a David Lynch film when disc, TV, streaming, etc, is all taken into account. There are hundreds of films financed and released every year in the $10M range that do comparable business. And if he really wanted to make a movie I’m sure he could do it for $5M-7M. There are definitely other personal reasons that he hasn’t made a movie in ten years, beyond financing issues (although that could be part of it). Maybe he was put off to some extent by the more divided reaction to Inland Empire.

It’s because most of his films are financially flops.