one for them

Steven Soderbergh's line for it was "one for them, one for me": take the studio's franchise, and the studio funds the next thing that is actually yours. Ang Lee made Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain, and also Hulk. Chloé Zhao won an Oscar for Nomadland one year and was directing Marvel's Eternals the next. Nobody finds these by browsing a director's shelf, because a shelf reads like a body of work, and this is the one film on it that was a job.