There's a glut of movies coming out of Hollywood. More films from the big studios, fewer from independent producers. End result: Not as many pictures worth seeing in theaters, and we'll see more of the better ones on DVD or cable.

These movies came from the money of the same smart people who also brought us the home mortgage and financial crises. People with hedge fund and related profits, and no idea of what to do with their new wealth, once they bought more mansions and more cars.

Anyone truly familiar with finance like, say, Warren Buffett, will tell you that investing in showbiz is the riskiest business of all. Plan to lose mucho moola. Only a few highly knowledgeable people, who know the smartest (and luckiest) people in the showbiz, put their money there.

A couple of generations ago, most of that outsider money went to Broadway. You might have seen the movie "The Band Wagon" (1953), where the writers and cast (which included Fred Astaire) act out the story, tell the jokes and sing the songs for a group of evening-attired investors they've wined and dined before pitching their new musical comedy. The "civilians" in the room were excited to be among such talent and eager to part with their cash.

Even a few movies were financed that way. Director Stanley Kubrick used money from a relative, a dentist, to partially finance one or two of his earliest pictures in the 1950s. Those films got him to Hollywood.

Instead of money from dentists or doctors, Hollywood has been infused with capital from the hedge fund, banking and venture capital worlds, the new superrich. The Wall Street Journal detailed their impact on Hollywood in a front-page article. It listed a bunch of films financed from these sources — films with well known, even Oscar-winning, directors and stars — that failed at the box office or went straight to DVD.

American investment has almost dried up in the last year, for obvious reasons. But the films that were already financed are still in the pipeline. Also entering the pipeline are pictures produced by oil-rich Abu Dhabi, The New York Times reports. It has financed a $1 billion package to make movies and video games with Warner Bros. Already they're planning their first U.S. picture, "Shorts," a family-friendly adventure from director Robert Rodriguez, of the "Spy Kids" movies. It stars William H. Macy.

The problem is no matter how many more films you put in the pipeline, they all end at a finite number of theater screens. Last year, Hollywood distributed 600 pictures to local theaters, compared to 466 five years ago, the Journal reported. That's 2.6 more pictures opening every weekend competing for your moviegoing ten spot.

More films mean more choices for moviegoers, maybe. I've found that if a new picture isn't a hit right away, it won't play more than a few weeks, a month at the most. It will be replaced by something else in the pipeline, a movie Hollywood has higher hopes for.

So, domestic box-office is up, from $9.3 billion in 2006 to $9.6 billion in 2007, according to box-office tracker Media by Numbers. But only because of higher ticket prices. The number of actual ticket sales is down 4.7 percent so far this year. This slide means box office revenues won't grow in 2008, predicts Media by Numbers.

Another consequence of the extra money: The "specialty film business [is] landing in the basement," says Peter Bart, editor of Variety, the showbiz newspaper. Bart is the Grand Old Man of Hollywood because he's been working there for 30-plus years, including a stint at Paramount Pictures during the "Godfather" era.

In his Variety column, Bart points out that films from studio-owned art house divisions took in $161 million through August. Compare that to $330 million last year and $418 million in 2006.

To put that in perspective — and to reveal what really determines the films that play at your local multiplex — one summer film alone, "Iron Man," which played from May through August, had total domestic box office of $318 million. Foreign box office was $253 million, for a worldwide take of $571 million. In a good year, all the art films in the world can't make as much as a single Hollywood blockbuster.

With all that extra money to spend, Hollywood began bidding up the distribution rights to specialty, art, and independent films, usually at film festivals such as Sundance.

As Bart explains, "The expectations of the studios for their art films were too high. Their production budgets were too lofty and their marketing budgets too ambitious." Whereas five years ago, these films, when carefully selected and smartly marketed, would produce excellent profits, now there's no money in them.

Bart adds that "there are more indie movies being made but, for some reason, they don't reflect the passion and artistic clout of films of the '60s or '70s." He quotes the chief of one of Hollywood's specialty division: "The kids are all trying to be commercial and they're falling on their faces." The curse of too much cash: a rush of money, a glut of films, more choices, fewer good ones.