I broadly agree with you, but it feels like cinema is shifting back to quality again. We're all tired of shitty superhero movies and many of the recent ones have bombed at the box office. Hell, one of the biggest movies of last year was mostly about men in suits talking about science and it was great. Dune pt. II is also an incredible breath of fresh air and shows that it's still possible to make a massive blockbuster with mass appeal but also a strong sense of style and integrity. I really hope this trend continues because I want real cinema and not mere 'content'.

I feel like bad movies nowadays are bad for simpler reasons. Trying to pin down why some movies from the 1980s worked or didn't, for that audience or a modern audience, was complicated and remains complicated. Nailing down the failure points of modern crap is so straightforward that it naturally becomes comedy.

Maybe it's a matter of proportion. There's complex duds now, and there were blatantly atrocious movies then. But it's like... people making movies grew up watching too many movies, and don't recognize which parts are a choice. They know a thing is supposed to happen, but don't recognize that it was clearly set up to appear obviously necessary, so they don't do that setup. And then the "have I got a movie for you" guy gets to say "unclear." The same cyclical regurgitation creates live-action adaptations of animated films, which neither build on nor live up to the originals, despite examples where stage musicals outclassed the celebrated hand-drawn films.

The good news is that AI is going to destroy all of this by eliminating Hollywood. I mean really - if any writer who can sketch their own animatics can extract a finished scene from their computer, what is a billion-dollar studio going to offer them besides marketing?

Can't even trust reviews.