>>211378462 (OP)Carpenter secured decent budgets because of the rampant success of Halloween, but most of his follow-ups were either failures or very moderate successes.
So you’re basically asking why hollywood doesn’t give money to maverick independently minded directors who don’t care about return of investment. I think the marketing for the movie was not right for the era either but w/e.
The real answer is the seventies had a lot of low budget, independently produced films that made a shitload and it encouraged big money executives to invest in more interesting movies. This film was made on the tail end of that as producers became conservative again, until Batman came around and they started making total retard movies like Dick Tracy and the Phantom. Lest we forget we also had producers like Dino de Laurentis, money guys who became wealthy from foreign films and were now breaking into the american market, and I would suggest too these guys were much more open minded than the money men we have today.