There is the rest of the world, you know... (Score 1)

Basically Hollywood is suffering from the from the need to make money on every film they produce to appease the experience that the average movie goer gets when they watch a film at the local multiplex. As a result, scripts have been watered down (so that the average person "gets it"), costs have gone up for CGI/effects/actors (so it pulls the viewers in), number of theatres and film prints (so you can't miss it). Originality and taking chances is not what making a blockbuster is about, it's about making simple scripts, amping it up with what's popular and blasting it out to the audience to make some cash and then get some major bucks on DVD rentals and cable later on. Movies aren't the only thing that's suffering - games have been flopping badly lately (again, high costs to make nice 3D effects, competition to make your FPS stand out) as well as anime (generic scripting, the usual angst ridden characters, harem style animes, or whatever... definitely a downstep from the 1990's with a few exceptions). Consider this like the evolution of a specialised virus that hits hard initially, gets popular and then becomes watered down like the common cold (the idea is to infect as much as you can in order to propagate). The more people you infect, the more cash you get, if that's the aim. If you really want to see the real deal you need to hit the indie circuit or International film festivals to see what is really out there and be willing to admit that it won't have all your average preconditioned movie mental laxatives thrown in. For example off the top of my head, Primer was quite popular at local indie films (despite having a nearly incomprehensible script). Other movies like Hard Candy (can't remember others so far) and documentaries like an Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car are picking up as well. (Having said that, documentaries may get big, then devolve again so you get documentaries about trivial popularist nonsense... I hope not for a while, though). On the other hand, since I got fairly bored with the stuff from USA I switched to watching foreign films, mostly Japanese, Korean and Chinese with a bit of European and others tossed in. Half the stuff USA has been recycling is from Japan (ala Ringu, Ju-On, Kairo) or Korea (Il Mare, some others I can't remember). Myself and a few of my friends now get regularly together for movie nights where English is primarily only used to order pizza or exclaim WTF!? loudly (especially if you're watching something like Zebraman, Survive Style 5+ or other wierd Japanese films, particularly by Miike. Might have to move onto Oh! My Zombie Mermaid and Nice Forest soon). If you're conditioned to whinge about how subs "are hard to read" just remember that in the world stage, English is not the primary language (it's Chinese, followed by Hindi, Spanish then English) so you really have no excuses about being self-righteous that everything has to be dubbed for your convenience. (Usually badly. You lose bucketloads of nuances in the process, and I consider it a bastardisation of a film). My advice - start hitting IMDB and good indie film sites like Twitch Film to find the real deal and get used to BitTorrent (as you won't find most of them in USA... for a long long time). Once you start, you'll find other people and web sites to keep you going.