It's really depressing that we've come to this spot, because economics kind of inherently favor tried and true branding over original ideas, and it seems like there's no going back (especially with the currently enormous international movie market). It's like we've just been really lucky that the studios didn't really figure this out and embrace it until the 80s/90s, which is why you could have the top 5 grossing movies in almost every year of the 70s/80s be an original feeling movie. Now, what's interesting to me is that this doesn't necessarily mean the movies have to be original properties.

Look at 1982: We got E.T, Blade Runner, Road Warrior, Conan, The Thing, and Blade Runner coming out within weeks of each-other. Now these mostly aren't original properties, Blade Runner/Conan are book adaptations, Road Warrior is a sequel and The Thing is a remake, but I would argue that the movies themselves feel very original for their time, and have very distinct identities that have made them live on over the years.

Maybe the bigger issue than even the branding is just how goddamn similar every movie coming out feels these days, regardless of what it's originally based on. Slowly but surely, it feels like all personality or quirkiness has been leeched out of genre film-making, and worse still, audiences have become conditioned towards this to the point that they will tend to reject a movie that doesn't follow this template. Trey's comment about sky-scrapers falling down in every movie is very on-point, and I would argue the same thing has happened to creature design. When is the last time we've had a cool iconic movie creature? Attack the Block is the only really recent example I can think of, and that's a pretty tiny movie that made very little money at the box-office.

This is why District 9 and Children of Men were such a breath of fresh air when they came out, because they had a very unique tone, identity, and approach that does not follow the typical blockbuster mold.

^ This relates to the earlier 'do big loud dumb summer blockbusters get a free pass from criticism?' debate.

Do 'CG effects demonstrations' count as movies? If we spend our money on them, knowing full well it's going to be dumb, do we have to right to wail about them being dumb?

There's also another factor that'll contribute to the future quality of big budget movies - the Chinese box office. The US domestic box office is becoming less important, which means producers will need to pay attention to what plays well in China. The Chinese have been isolated from western culture for so long and therefore didn't grow up with 1980s action movies that we sneer at now. It's all new for them. And if they love their new-found movie diet of cartoon wall-to-wall explosions without dialogue and simplistic good v evil plotlines, then that doesn't encourage sophistication and subtlety, morally ambiguity or self-aware genre references.

If you look at the top 100 all-time on box office mojo, US domestic box office used to be over half of total worldwide gross. Now the current top ten averages about a third, some even have a quarter, and that'll only continue to shrink.

If nothing else, Battleship is definitely better than Transformers 2, if for no other reason than because it's about a half hour shorter. Seriously, tho, I kinda enjoyed the hell out of it. By the time they were at the 'grid' part of the movie I was giggling pretty much nonstop at just how completely insane every aspect of the movie was.

Holy shit, stratified layers of fail in that photo.  Not only is there a Battleship novelization, but PETER DAVID wrote it?  Jesus...

So, I just finished this podcast, probably the most depressing ending to DiF commentary I've heard which scares me. I mean, I figured Trey had been around the horn a couple of times but battleship apparently was the tipping point. But, like he said in Avengers, movies like that and Battleship will be a bunch of skyscrapers falling down. But, the fact that Battleship apparently took that and other affects to a whole new level puts me on the same level of Trey that Hollywood is just producing the same thing because somewhere there was a movie that made it and now that is all they make.
In my opinion, the video game looks better