[marshray]

There would be no Godfather without Hollywood. No Apocalypse Now. (also no Taxi Driver, no Star Wars, no Indiana Jones, no MASH or Nashville)

So what have they done lately?

I think you're proving the point. They're an empty shell of their former greatness and should be put out of their misery to make room for whatever great thing is to come next.

[Samuel_Michon]

"So what have they done lately?"

Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:

Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.

[Retric]

The Prestige and The Departed are from 2006 and I would say 1/2 of what's left sucked. Still, listing a few movies that don't suck is hardly a ringing endorsement.

Pixar demonstrates that it's possible to make 10 movies without 5 of them being terrible. If the rest of Hollywood knew what it was doing you would expect the same quality from Sony pictures etc.

[Samuel_Michon]

Do you really think there was a time in which every new movie was a masterpiece? I seriously doubt it, and I don't think movies are worse now than they were 10 or 20 years a go.

[Natsu]

There's an inherent survivorship bias that makes past art look better. The good art survives because people make copies of it, reference it, etc. The bad art just gets forgotten because nobody even wants to make fun of it any more.

[Retric]

50% of a studio's output not being terrible is hardly the same thing as expecting every new movie to be a masterpiece. With studio's spending 100 million on a 'low' budget film you would expect they could spend 1 million to mock up 10 different films and pick the top 10% of scripts and fund them. Instead they use independent funding for most films which gives them far less choice.

PS: Pixar is hardly the first company to fund things internally raise the bar. You can find other studio's that used that model and produced a lot of decent films one after another. It's just that after a while the people running things don't really have a taste for talent and they can't handle the risks.

[sroussey]

Ooooh... 1999. Fight Club. Go. American Beauty. The Matrix. Boys don't cry. Austin Powers. The Sixth Sense. The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Cider House Rules. Magnolia. Mansfield Park. The Red Violin. Trick. American Pie. ;)

That is despite the fact that installment movies of James Bond, Star Wars, Toy Story, etc., that year.

Everything seemed great that year. Or perhaps if was also a good year for me, and therefore everything seemed good because of that...

[mminer]

At the time of The Godfather's release there was the same mountain of crap in cinemas that there is today. It's easy to look back on "the good old days" and conclude that the quality of modern filmmaking has decreased, but you'll be ignoring all the other junk that made it to the silver screen. Like any medium, 90% of what's produced commercially is garbage, but future generations will enjoy the films of P.T. Anderson, Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, and countless other artists working today and say "they just don't make 'em like they used to."

Also, since Taxi Driver by Martin Scorcese was mentioned, take a look at his latest film Hugo. I think you'll agree it's every bit as good as his earlier work.

[cop359]

All the animated movies; some of which I think are absolutely great, would not have happened.

[whatusername]

Does Pixar count as Hollywood? I guess it does -- but it feels somehow separate.

[georgemcbay]

Pixar is part of Disney now, which is about as Hollywood as you can get.

Will that impact the quality of their titles? Well, their last film was Cars 2... not exactly a high water mark for them by any measure.