There is no question that the quality of movies has declined in the last two decades. What talking heads and media analysts fail to grasp is that the film studios have garbled the idea that the bigger the risk, the greater the reward. With studios starved to feed their parent media conglomerates ' "synergy marketing strategies", the heads of those studios (who are now mostly marketing executives) want to reduce the amount of financial risk by any means necessary. This risk-averse mentality combined with the need to outspend the other guy has resulted in an overall steady decline in cinema's quality, leading us to our current box office implosion. The last great decade of cinema was the 1970's, when the movie studios nurtured a crop of daring filmmakers and took huge risks in financing their visions. The 80's saw the rise of the reliable summer blockbuster and fall Oscar harvest. Those days are gone.
Inflated movie budgets are now regularly reported in the standard nightly news. When a studio spends almost a quarter of a billion dollars on a movie, they are both ashamed of that number as well as egomaniacal enough to know it builds intrigue. The quarter billion dollar budget is reached only with movies that the marketing department seized upon in the beginning. Remakes of old movies the parent corporation already owns, old and new TV shows, theme park ride-films, and other familiar properties get developed because the marketing heads who now run the studios believe that the "power of the brand" will automatically hedge their risk and bring in audiences. This simply isn't true. Hollywood apocrypha says that George of the Jungle was made into a live action feature not because market research said people loved the show, but because they vaguely remembered the theme song. A good movie starts with a good idea, and a great movie is when you bring the public something they've never seen before; something they can only experience as a collective audience in the movie theater. When was the last time you saw a movie that made you gasp out loud from its sheer bravado and originality?
The studio system mirrors the rest of the business world. The larger they become the slower big businesses are able to incorporate new ideas. The role of the entrepreneur, or the independent filmmaker, is to move quickly, cheaply, and bring new ideas to market faster than the big corporations who are forced to use existing pipelines and facilities. The indie entrepreneur is fast, flexible, and adapts quickly to change. Once the indie filmmaker creates demand in the market for his widget, it is co-opted by the big conglomerates and assimilated. The indie filmmaker can afford to take risks because they're not enslaved to a stock price. Sure, they have to recoup their costs to their backers, but there are a lot less zeroes to the left of the decimal point than the studios have. Movie studios have gotten wise to this model and have created arms of their empire to purchase and distribute self-financed independent films. This limits their risk because the widget has already been developed, field tested, and is ready for packaging and sale. The success of the 2005 Oscar nominees attest to the success of this model. You only need to do a quality comparison between the in-house product made by the studios versus their indie acquisitions to see proof of what audiences want to see. Purchasing a few dozen million-dollar-movies that earn anywhere from five to twenty million dollars each versus making a single, quarter billion dollar movie that audiences might reject outright seems like easy accounting to me. Make cheaper, better, riskier movies.
It's not just the narrative content. Movie stars have also helped sabotage the quality of movies. Movie stars were made because the actors were imbued with the fascinating elements of their roles. Now the stars infuse the roles with their real-life personalities, sucking the life and interest out of the characters they are supposed to inhabit. The studios play into this because the marketing heads believe that the star's brand carries with it paying audiences. This simply isn't true when the audience can get the same experience from tabloid TV shows and magazines (that, coincidentally, are owned by the studio's parent media corporations). Once again, the basic formulas that built the studios into media empires have been inverted, and the result is bad movies starring actors who rarely take risks with their public image.
Those of us that write original material are frequently met with production companies who don't know how to sell daring narratives to their marketing bosses, and agents who only know how to sell to those production companies. I grew up on a steady diet of studio made movies, the best of which were exciting new stories. I also grew up the son of an advertiser, and watched the shift as the corporate brand on the box became more important than the product inside. Movies today suck because we've been trained to judge books by their cover and it all looks like the same crap.