“Hollywood is wondering just what, precisely, is going wrong — not just with The Island and Stealth but with the whole high-octane action/adventure/sci-fi genre to which they belong,” Hollywood Reporter‘s Nicole Sperling observes. People are worried, in other words, that audiences aren’t lining up to see crap like they used to. Since the dawn of the blockbuster mentality 30 years ago (born of the mega-successes of Jaws in ’75 and Star Wars in ’77), Hollywood has been making more and more big-budget, high-concept theme-park movies. Inevitably, most of these have been second- or third-tier. And now suddenly people are saying “no” when a couple of second-tier films like The Island and Stealth come along and that’s…what?…a bad thing? I can see why people would regard this as scary, but sometimes that’s good medicine. Hollywood has been told, simply, that boilerplate movies won’t do and they’ll have to do better. That seems like an excellent thing to me. The more failure that happens in this town, the harder it’ll be for the bullshitters to survive and the more chances there will be for the new guys with the fresh ideas.
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