What movie "auteur" has the least picky target audience to satisfy.

I dunno, but Quentin Tarantino could film a computer desk assembly and I'd camp outside Sundance Cinema at midnight for tickets.

 

I think of the same names as already mentioned--Sandler and Ferrell for comedies and Michael Bay for action. Tyler Perry certainly fits the bill, but a discussion of his work requires taking in racial factors, and that's too confounding and would derail the thread.

What I find weird is that most of my friends with not-so-demanding tastes--let's just call them "dumb" for the sake of brevity--will religiously see films from Sandler, Ferrell, etc... and they almost always come back disappointed. "It was okay." "It had some funny parts, but uhh" or they'll keep saying "It was good" in such a manner that it's obvious that they're trying to convince themselves to believe it. They go based on the name-recognition hoping they'll see another Old School or Billy Madison (a cinematic gold standard to be sure! heh) but they never get it. Even they realize at some level that these follow-up works are even more derivative than the previous ones... and yet, they just keep going back for more! Weird.

Now Michael Bay on the other hand I think has an incredible pulse on what the average American movie-goer wants to see. Sometimes there's no better solution for creating dumb media for dumb people than having a dumb guy at the helm. I think the average fan of his work doesn't even really know who Michael Bay is--my dumb friends probably wouldn't recognize the name--but rather, they see the explosions, the renegade male leads and comically sexualized females and they're drawn in. No name-recognition needed for Bay; the guy knows his audience and keeps them satisfied.

 

Little known fact about Michael Bay, he went to the Art Center College of Designin Pasadena, California along with Zach Snyder and Tarsem Singh.

 

Gotta be Spielberg, for living directors. (Capra, if not.)

More so than Scorsese, Spielberg has the biggest overlap in the Venn Diagram between "Auter, Distinct Sensibility to his Movies" and "Mass Audience Appeal."

He makes blockbusters, yet does so with a distinctive style.

If not him, James Cameron?