That was true, though.

In 2018, a Venom movie got a 31% Rotten Tomatoes score, and made $856 million.

It was true if you didn't spend too much, DVD sales bailed out a lot of bad movies, but streaming doesn't have the same direct revenue.

I'm gonna nudge your sentence a little bit to make it sound both more realistic and much worse at the same time:
The implication here is that it used to be you could make a ~~bad~~ LAZY movie and still profit.

A bad movie can be full of passion, it can be an interesting failure.
A lazy movie is phoning it in; it has the opposite of passion; here is where all we see is suits with Ferraris and sycophantic (corporate ass-licking) writers and directors.

I admit prior to the pandemic I wouldn't have minded going to a somewhat mediocre but kinda entertaining movie as part of a night out. Now it is too expensive and the theaters are depressing shadows of their former selves and unless I 100% know a movie is good and can get 2-3 family members to agree I'm not going to a theater.

I think something else that has happened is the breadth of available media in the streaming age means it is easy for individuals to find a show or movie that fits their individual tastes. No compromise needed. I know in my house getting everyone to agree to watch a single show or movie is impossible. No way we're all piling in the car, driving through ridiculous traffic to sit in a dirty theater that smells like warmed over urinal cakes to watch something none of us are particularly interested in. Why do that when I can chill watching reruns of Stargate SG-1, my spouse is rocking Tik Tok, my kid is watching Twitch?

Movies as a collective experience died circa 2020.