Since the Great Depression, film has had a deeply rooted role in American culture. It has played an immense part in our social lives and in our need to express ourselves. An incredible amount of people have found film as an outlet for their creative powers, about 5 billion videos are seen on YouTube every single day (Smith). All the power that video has in todays society, its largest and proprietary element, Cinema, has lost the awesome and artistic power that it once had in exchange for quick and profitable remakes or stretched series. Modern movies lack the zeal and awe of its hay-day due to a fear of monetary loss and the apathy of the mass audience to demand the artistic elements that landed cinema in the center of American culture. 

Film became a centerpiece in American culture during the great depression because it allowed people to escape the hardships of their lives for as long as they wanted for only a few cents. Theaters in the 1930’s would allow customers to see one film or spend all day in front of the screen for a flat rate. This sort of entertainment, known as long form entertainment, has been a part of society since the epic poem was developed in Ancient Greece. Since then long-form entertainment has developed to the opera and theater and when the technologies that afforded humanity the ability to record video, movies and film have dominated long form entertainment. In its prime the film industry undertook daring projects and invested heavily into new and original ideas that allowed for such significant cultural impacts like “Star Wars”. More recently however, the industry has become more obsessed with its bottom line and less concerned with the actual art that is created. The art and cinematic elements are no longer held in such high esteem. Stephanie Palmer is a acclaimed studio executive and has been counted as one of the top 35 executives under 35 by Forbes magazine. In her 2013 article she argues that executives are afraid to invest millions of dollars into an original project because there is no proof or history of the piece being successful, “you wouldn’t drive your newborn around if you couldn’t be confident in the safety of the vehicle (Palmer)”. This fear, or rather, hesitation to fund original content in cinema is one of the major drivers in the shift in our societies long form entertainment away from film. This hesitancy is one of the reasons that streaming services have started to grab a foothold in the market of long form entertainment. In its seventeen years of its existence Netflix has not only dominated its market by pushing out competition like “Block Buster” but also by pioneering a new medium of long form entertainment with there online series. Netflix in particular has made a mission out of providing a constant stream of original content with seemly little thought into whether or not the concept is proven. While this does mean the public is subject to countless Adam Sandler programs, they are also given an equal amount of extremely good series with wholly unique concepts. Streaming services such as Netflix and HBO have been developing their original series to the point that many Hollywood stars have made the transition from the big screen, to roles in these programs. Stars such as Mathew McConaughey and Kevin Spacey both lead critically acclaimed series on Netflix and HBO respectively. Original content has been a huge catalyst for this success, with shows such as “Orange is the New Black”, “Stranger Things” and “House of Cards” all being among the sites most popularly viewed series. Netflix has also reported that they will be releasing over 1,000 hours of original content in 2017 (Smith), a clear indication that the trend will not be slowing down anytime soon and that the effects on cinema surely will not lessen. 

This lack of original content and unwillingness to fund a project with no proven history explains so perfectly why recently we have seen so many remakes of popular 80’s films and two part series finales. In the case of cashing out on proven ideas, films that were hugely successful thirty years ago are so commonly resurrected and remade often with very little reason why. Films like “3:10 to Yuma” and “Footloose”, that have extremely little in way of effects or CGI, it would be frivolous to reboot them and yet both films were remade in the 2000’s with a cultural icon such as “Footloose” being reduced to hardly more than an MTV special. And this trend of cashing in on proven stories is not limited to reboots. In recent years franchise films such as “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” have begun to divide their final installments into two part simply to ride the popularity and profits out for another film. Neither of these trends have slowed up recently either, the 2010’s saw both of the two most popular teen film series, “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games”, split their final parts into two. Perhaps the greatest disgrace to film under this trend was the three-part adaptation of Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” which is truly only a prequel. “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy was and remains one of the greatest undertakings in film, a prime example of funding original ideas given that all three of the films were shot at the simultaneously and all of which last at least three and a half hours; all three currently sit amongst the top 15 highest rated films on IMDB. Because of the great success however the opportunity to cash out on it was just too much for the commercial nature of Hollywood. Not a single film in  “The Hobbit” series has broken a 70 percent on the Metacritic, a site that averages over 40 reviewers including Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. In an article for The Gaurdian Xan Brooks describes this trend bluntly as “the movie equivalent of pumping chickens full of water – Bulking of the produce to maximize revenue (Brooks).”

Another aspect of this decline is the fact that for the most part the market is with what Evan Puschank describes as “Passable Movies”, these are films that have just enough in them to skate by. This includes comedies that squeeze cheap laughs out of a poor script or action films that rely so heavily on effects and shoot-outs that the entire story, or lack there of, is eclipsed. Puschank runs a channel on YouTube where he posts weekly commentary on elements of art and artists, two of the most poignant are his commentary on “The Epidemic of Passable Movies” and “Interstellar: When Spectacle Eclipses Story”. In his discussion on passable movies Puschank makes a note of the rise of Intertextuality, where elements of previous works are added in to new ones as an attempt to ride the coattails of its success. He specifically mentions how Hollywood takes an entire scene that is believed to hold an emotional store and transplants it repeatedly, such as writing out equations or codes on a glass window. This particular scene can be seen played out in films such “Beautiful Mind”, “Social Network” and most recently “The Accountant”.  It is his belief that the more we reuse these false representations of life the farther the art drifts from being actually relatable. Similarly to the rise of this trend of Intertextuality Puschank makes a note about how the spectacle of a futuristic or action packed film can be used as a crutch for a weak story. 

Because of this rise of passable movies and a seemingly apathetic market studies have been carried out to determine how much a critical review actually effects how the film does in theaters. One study took used the mean critical ratings and gross profits to create a chart visualizing the relationship. The astonishing thing about the chart is that with a few exceptions for extremely well reviewed films, most well reviewed films made as much money as those with reviews in the mid 40’s (King). Another statistician went even further in his attempts to test the findings of King.  In his journal Alain d’Astous tested five hypotheses and came to the conclusion that the critics review only plays a significant role in the films success “when the judgment is inconsistent with the critic's predisposition toward the film director and when other critics' judgments show favorable consensus (d’Astrous).” Essentially the reviews only made an impact when all of them were overwhelming positive, a trend illustrated in King’s chart, or the review when against the authors own previous bad reviews of a director, both of which are rare occurrences. This new and growing disregard for an entire industry of expert opinions truly exemplifies the idea of a apathetic consumer. The market simply hasn’t shown that it demands films of greater quality and as long as the market allows Hollywood to make cheap and quick films for the same profitability as epic and time consuming masterpieces that’s what they’re going to do. Hollywood is a business and art that doesn’t make money simply doesn’t get made anymore. 

Similarly in a 1999 journal Morris Holbrook surveyed over 1,000 different films and assessed 20 different elements and their impact on the overall success of the film. In his findings films that were generally positive and less challenging were received far better that gritty or artistic films by a large portion of the public. It is his belief that films of less substance that are easier for the masses to understand inevitably push the more artistic films out of the market because the studios that produce films must always cater to the masses or risk economic loss. The underlying concept is one that shows a definitive root cause of the growing issue but an implication that our society in general can’t grow to expect more is not only pretentious but serves only as a death sentence for the art of cinema. An appreciation for higher art isn’t an inherent quality but rather one that is developed when surrounded by that quality of work: if studios abandon the effort to create higher quality art then we will lose the environment that cultivates it as a whole.

Many people today would say that films have made huge leaps and bounds in the capabilities of film studios, with 3-D filming, CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) and far better effects how could movies possibly be getting worse. It’s a fair question, how could studios be producing worse films with the huge opportunity that these advances have afforded them. The truth of the matter is that many of them have managed to be truly amazing and have utilized the new technologies to the fullest potential, but those films are becoming more few and far between. It is far more common for a film to rely to heavily on the spectacle and leave the audience lacking a real attachment to the characters or plot. The 2010 Oscars is a prime example of this issue. “Avatar” was a huge project lead by a extremely well awarded director, James Cameron, and it lost the Best Picture award to “The Hurt Locker” despite it making over ten times more money to date. Unlike the other categories at the Oscars, Best Picture is voted on by every member of the academy rather than just those working in one particular field. This is a prime example of the film industry as a collective whole to recognize the importance of story of frills (Hutchinson). “Avatar” was a tremendous undertaking in CGI, the facial renderings were on the bleeding edge of the technology at the time and every plant in the film held over twenty thousand more polygons than Gollum from “Lord of the Rings”(Semlyen). The masses of the public were enthralled by the special effects and 3-D; the film has made over 760 million dollars gross in the U.S. alone despite the film’s story is a stones throw from Pocahontas in space. “Avatar” lost not because of its lack of awe but because it is not real, it is too caught up in its own awe to be human. “The Hurt Locker” offers a stark contrast to this issue. The film has very few scenes that fit a classic war movies archetype, its power as a film rely very strongly on the complexity of its characters and the way we can relate ourselves to them. 

As the influence and presence of streaming services and other online entertainment continues to rise, the hope for cinema as a cultural centerpiece is fading fast. If we as a society wish to maintain the incredible medium of movies, in all its wide screen and fake butter glory, we as consumers must demand more from the studios producing them. A greater emphasis must be placed on quality cinematography and screenwriting, and the era of simple shot reverse-shot comedy must go with it. We must, as consumers, demand that CGI be used to take films to new places and not settle for the crutch that its so obviously become. As a culture more open and accepting, as we have ever been the possibilities for original stories is at a time more endless than ever before. If public schools were to spend as much time discussing film and the art of editing as much as classical painters we might be one step closer to a society that can appreciate and put value to great cinema. The more educated we become as an audience the more we can support art house theaters and create a community around the quality film that we have come to appreciate again and in turn force studios to keep producing it. As long as we as consumers allow films such as “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2”, which holds a five percent review on Rotten Tomatoes, to come in second at opening weekend and gross over 107 million dollars we are doomed to a sea of films as memorable as “Mean Girls 2”.
