[somenameforme]

Wiki has a nice little series of pages with releases that placed 1st during at least one weekend in a year. The pages aren't well designed and have only a nav button at the very buttom (beyond even the references), but you can also just change the year in the URL manually. Anyhow, it's definitely not how you remember it.

2005 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2005_box_office_number...

2023 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2023_box_office_number...

Although of course you are right. 2005 was not a great year for Hollywood, though it had some decent movies like Sin City, and comedy still hadn't been banned yet (Meet the Fockers, 40 Year-Old Virgin) - so that was cool. But contrasted against 2023 (and the contemporary era in general), it makes it look like the Golden Era of Hollywood.

[fingerlocks]

I don’t see it. For the highest grossing, three out of ten are original non-sequels if we are being generous in 2005, versus two of ten in 2023.

[somenameforme]

It's certainly quite hard to see things when you close your eyes. You intentionally ignored the lists of movies I referenced to try to find one you could spin into being 'not so bad.' And even in your cherry picked sample, there's still a decline - substantially more so when once one factors in your quite creative counting.

Modern Hollywood has always found itself in ruts, as efforts at stable revenue generation gradually give way to creative decline. For instance in the 90s every film was a disaster film of ever deteriorating quality, but they eventually managed to pull themselves out of it before the decline hit too hard. But this rut they're stuck in today seems like it's become inextricable and will be their final resting place, until we gradually see China become the new Hollywood. Incidentally one of the 2 novel top grossing 'Hollywood' films of 2023 you referenced was Chinese! All we have left is Christopher Nolan, one of the few individuals in Hollywood still putting out decent films.

[fingerlocks]

I scrolled down to the top 10 highest grossing section in each link you posted and counted the number of non-remakes, sequels, or “spandex” movies. Those are your links and the categories you defined.

Sorry I’m not really following the entirety of your rant.

[somenameforme]

You ignored 40+ films from both years, and these films made the difference even more strikingly apparent than your cherry picking.

As for your understanding, I think there are generally two types of films in Hollywood. There's the largely uninspired make a buck type film, and there's the more creative works where you have a group of people who actually have a pretty neat idea. 'Hollywood' did not remake the Little Mermaid because there was some wave of inspiration where they felt they could really create an amazing film. It was just an uninspired sifting through an IP bucket to find what could be remade to make a movie for the year. And that drivel is what they dug up.

And this is of course nothing new. But what's changed has largely been the ratio. I reference the spandex films not because there's anything inherently wrong with the genre, but because it's become the clearest embodiment of this uninspired conveyor-belt style film-making. The overwhelming majority of these stories may as well have been written by ChatGPT, and the future ones probably will be! And Hollywood is absolutely spamming us with them at this point. But there's nothing inherently awful about the genre. The Dark Knight was clearly an inspired and quiet good film, yet of course it was also spandex.

I've absolutely nothing against Hollywood and am more than happy to see an inspired film. In recently saw Dune 2 yesterday - a sequel of a remake!? But I have no interest in watching 'conveyor belt films', and that is currently the vastly overwhelming majority of what is coming out of Hollywood. And that's not how it used to be.