Salke said she had decided that the way forward for Amazon involves different “lanes.” Those include awards-worthy specialty films, including five she bought at the recent Sundance Film Festival, a couple for eye-popping prices sexual thrillers like “Basic Instinct” (1992) or “Body Heat” (1981), a genre that most studios have abandoned and films from Blumhouse, the horror studio behind hits like “The Purge.” Ms. “I don’t think we had diverse-enough points of view in the storytelling.” “What we struggled with, I think, was putting too much focus on a narrow prestige lane,” said Jennifer Salke, who took over as the head of Amazon Studios last March after successful stints at NBC and 20th Century Fox Television. Now a company that is accustomed to entering markets and making the incumbents shudder is pushing the reset button. “ Beautiful Boy,” based on the best-selling book, cost $23 million and collected $7.6 million. Woody Allen’s “Wonder Wheel” cost $25 million to make and took in only $1.4 million in North America. But the box office game is harder than it looks, and Amazon released six flops in a row.

No more would it rely on established Hollywood partners to push its films into theaters. The trouble started late in 2017, when the tech giant moved into self-distribution. The film business has chewed up Amazon over the last year and a half.

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