Blockbuster!

 In a world where movies all seem the same, one director is willing to speak the truth, the movie industry is near the end, a meltdown is upon us.

That's what Steven Spielberg says is in store for Hollywood.

Really?   I've seen a fair amount of movies over my lifetime and there's always movies that bomb, and there are movies that reach for the lowest common denominator, and then the occasional movie bursts out and everyone tries to milk its apparent recipe dry (often by mixing metaphors so poorly they don't make any sense).

Studios crash and burn, bankrupt and get bought out.  Orion, Republic, Harpo, TriStar, MGM, Pan Am.  It's a crazy business, this show business.  And there have always been bad movies, and the industry is always dying, but never quite dies out.

Now that's not to say we're in some golden age of movie-making.  We're not.  But the fact is that Golden Ages only become so when the dross of any given era is forgotten. That's why people think hymns are so much better too, after enough years the ones that last are the good ones, with the rest being ignored and forgotten.

So, we're not at the lowest point (which many historians agree happened when Shia Leboef was cast in an Indiana Jones movie, noting that the plot itself thought it such a terrible idea that it committed suicide before filming started).

But we're not at a good point.  There's a particular badness about our era of movies.  What is it?  That special effects gets in the way of a good plot?  Well, the 80s were filled with movies with bad plots and bad special effects. So, at least the special effects are good. But they're not enough.

We are in the era of really high expectations, probably higher than any other point in history.  Watching old classics makes it clear that the standards were just not all that rigorous, and people put up with a lot more and were thrilled with a lot less. 

We're also living in a time where the average American living room has better audio and video than ever before. Why go pay a lot of money, paying more money if you want a drink or, heaven forbid, a bucket of popcorn, when the experience is good enough at home.

Why sit around a bunch of slobs, who talk a lot, can't stay off their smartphone for even a few minutes, and who invade your space when there's all manner of other seats available. The seats aren't comfortable enough, the sound isn't good enough, the screen isn't big enough to want to put up with that unless there's some major spectacle going on.  So, smaller budget movies lose out to bigger cinema extravaganzas.

Only I think that's an excuse.  Gatekeepers aren't always the creative types, they are better at currying favor with their superiors than identifying genius. How else to explain someone like Jeff Zucker's career, who kept getting promoted higher and higher at NBC until it went from the number 1 network to losing to networks that weren't even created yet, transcending time and space in the process.  Gatekeeper keep their jobs by blaming others: directors, actors, writers, "the Industry", commenters, genres, producers, the audience and their philistine ways.

Those who get paid to write about the bad showings blame old characters like Lone Ranger, or genres like Westerns, even when Clint Eastwood could make a $10 million  Western tomorrow and it'd be the #1 movie for a couple of weeks.  Maybe there's another difference between movies like Lone Ranger or Wild, Wild West and movies like Silverado or Unforgiven.  Sheesh, a western  was even popular and nominated for a lot of awards just a couple of years ago.

 Good writing is good writing.  But good writers don't always make good salesman and so a lot of dreck gets made while quality is ignored.  Every once in a while, someone makes a mistake and hires a good writer and a good director with good actors who fit their parts, and even though there's a lot of special effects it ends up being a good movie that makes a lot, and I mean a lot, of money.

And even more rarely, a movie without special effects is good and popular. Happens once a generation, but it does happen.