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I agree with your post, but I want to add:
Hollywood is a deeply uncreative industry in decline. Inflation adjusted, domestic US box office peaked in 2002. They're selling about as many tickets today as in 1995, despite an additional 70 million Americans. Some more stats: 61% of Americans saw zero movies in theaters, the average American who did see a movie saw just three and change, down from 30% of Americans seeing zero movies and an average close to seven in 2007.
2007 is seventeen years ago. That's, you know, a while, but Todd Phillips was already a working director then. Bob Iger was already CEO of Disney in 2007. A lot of these guys came up in a totally different industry than the one they're working in now. It's rare for dominant industries to disappear gracefully.
This decline has little to do with the movies being made, and more to do with changes to the media environment. The rise of streaming, the rise of the $500 70" TV has made going to the theater a less interesting thing to do.
There's a great scene from Mad Men where Don Draper, thinking about the rise of rock music and how kids are tying bands into their identities, asks "When did music become so important?" In the 60s, music suddenly mattered as part of identity formation and politics in a way it hadn't been for Don growing up. Now, I'm not sure Music does matter, music mattering may have been a brief period.
Movies have mattered from just after their invention to now. I'm not sure they really do anymore. And the industry is coming to terms with it.
I think the rise of streaming certainly hurt movies, but I submit that it’s the poor quality of the films themselves that are killing the industry off completely. The writing is often boring and predictable, and the plots of most movies can be easily discernible by watching the trailers. The superhero movie is boring, nothing interesting happens in them, and so nobody gets excited to go see New Marvel or New DC because everyone knows the Brand and they know what the experience will be like long before they buy their (relatively expensive) tickets, popcorn and soda. The same can be true of other genres there’s just nothing interesting going on as movies converge on the same Save the Cat beat sheet with the same progressive philosophy and the same Joss Weaten “take nothing seriously” sensibility.
This comes about because of the insular nature of Hollywood. You want in, you have to attend film schools in one of maybe a dozen Big Name schools. You need a patron. You need to go to Hollywood where you get invited to the right parties. The expense and time sink necessary to make it pretty much precludes anyone who doesn’t come from money, and the constant need to network often accidentally on purpose weeds out anyone who isn’t on the liberal side of Woke Progressive. But since everyone involved comes from the same background with the same or similar life experiences, they cannot be creative. There’s nothing new brought in. You won’t ever hear the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one. You won’t hear anything authentic to a religious person. These writers have likely never had a ten minute conversation with someone like that.
It's a process, though I haven't seen a single comic book movie since the Toby Maguire Spiderman and the last Star Wars content I consumed was The Force Awakens so I'm hopelessly behind on the question of what exactly is so bad about modern Hollywood, I've checked out.
The decline of the industry begins with the technology. No one can reasonably argue that if only we got "the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one, [or] anything authentic to a religious person" that the film industry would be doing a-ok.
The shitty things we all hate about the movie industry in this thread are mostly a response to the decline of the American box office. They're hemorrhaging ticket sales, in a model built on ticket sales that still considered home-viewing an afterthought. They still haven't yet totally figured out how to make home-viewing profitable without the box office ticket sales. They settled on the big franchises and comic book movies because they thought they would still bring people out to the theaters. For the most part, the non-franchise films do even worse in theaters! Because the technology only supports the spectacle comic book films: the gap between theater and home has narrowed to the point where there's almost zero value in seeing a comedy or romance in theaters, only the big spectacle benefits from the big screen.
The preening morality plays are a natural result of a culture of retreat and failure in the industry: "I'm producing this film in a way that I can explain in job interviews next fall". They know that the industry is sinking and a lot of the films they make will be, by any reasonable metric, failures; so they become more insular, more focused on getting one of the limited number of seats before the music stops. If you fail progressively, you have a narrative to latch onto as to why it wasn't your fault. If you fail boldly, trying something new, it's just on you.
How do you fix the streaming-old-movies-on-a-75-inch-TV problem for the film industry? The answer isn't going to be thoughtful Christian values films, if the people to make those even existed. But without a good answer, the film industry isn't going to suddenly change. That's what will alter the calculus.
My point is that a lot of what we're arguing about in the movie industry is this play. It's a terrible play that went horribly wrong immediately, but the odds of winning the game were already effectively zero, so criticizing the play design is kind of pointless.
I’m not going to deny the tech has a part. But I find the writing part to be a big turn off personally. No character in any story has any sort of real arc, the beats are nearly identical with only minor variations to accommodate the plot. I think part of what made the first Joker so interesting is that the character was different than the usual comic characters and rather than a story that plods along the usual tried and true beats of a superhero movie, it went in a different direction. Authentic and interesting characters, unique stories, and better dialogue I think would help a great deal. I think it would also help a great deal if the heroes of movies and their close associates didn’t have such strong plot armor. They just don’t feel like there are real stakes for a lot of reasons. Nobody gets hurt in a serious way that lasts. The characters aren’t personally invested in the outcome. It’s just watching CGI heroes do CGI stunts and I’m often left wondering why I care.
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