Hollywood: Garbage In, Garbage Out

I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old so I don’t get to go see movies in the theater.  And as much as I love movies, I really don’t miss it.  I thought I would, but no; I can’t think of more than one or two movies in the last two years or so that made me say “I gotta go see that right now!”

There are a lot of reasons I prefer to watch films at home but one of them is surely the fact that there have been so many garbagey products hitting the big screen.  You look at these trailers, read the reviews and see the casts and it basically turns you off of the whole enterprise.

The trailer for New Years Eve alone probably turned me off from seeing not just that movie but maybe like 25 others.  It’s just contemptible trash piled onto rubbish, stuffed with debris.  Then lit on fire and placed before us with a sickening grin.  Look how many “movie stars” we wedged into this piece of sh*t.  Your girlfriend is going to force you to come to this at knifepoint, ha ha ha!

F*ck you.

The movies of 2011, on the whole, were an embarrassment.  Green Lantern and Captain America and X-Men: First Class combined didn’t do the business Inception did the year before according to The Atlantic.  They looked like terrible me-too movies in the trailers and we heard from the small group of people who actually saw them that they were, in fact, terrible me-toos.

2011 was a year in which the film business regressed.  In trying to so hard to make products that they thought we would buy, they ended up showing their hand a bit too much – the best salesman makes it so you don’t even realize when you’re being sold to.  With this crop of films, it was blatant that we were being pandered to.

And apparently you guys agree with me.  Let’s quantify Hollywood’s quality problem in 2011 with a little help from the LA Times…

As most in the industry had expected, ticket sales were down last year compared with 2010. Receipts dropped about 3% to $10.2 billion, according to Hollywood.com, while attendance fell to a 16-year low. Approximately 1.28 billion people headed to the multiplex in 2011, a drop of about 4% from last year, when 1.33 billion went to the cinema.

Hollywood is perfectly within its rights to continue to do the following:

* Pretending Mark Ruffalo, Shia LeBoeuf and Ryan Reynolds are movie stars

* Keep making the same romantic comedy every six months and pretending it’s a new movie

* Forcing this horrendous 3D experience down our throats for the premium ticket price it commands (even when the film in question has no need to be shown that way – We Bought a Zoo 3D?  Come on already)

* Contributing to a standard 5% ticket price hike each and every year regardless of the state of the economy, the fact that the films are not 5% better and the theaters, if anything, are basically 10% filthier.

* Allowing Brett Ratner to continue his life’s work of destroying American Cinema

And we, the consumers, are also within our rights to no longer head out to the theater to pay for it.  Sounds like a fair deal.  If anyone needs me, I’ll be on the web.