This NYT story talks about the tepid movie box office take this summer and addresses the following no-brainer question: Too many Hollywood movies are simply not good enough.

Some excerpts:

With the last of the summer blockbusters fading from the multiplex, Hollywood's box office slump has hardened into a reality that is setting the movie industry on edge. The drop in ticket sales from last summer to this summer, the most important moviegoing season, is projected to be 9 percent by Labor Day, and the drop in attendance is expected to be even deeper, 11.5 percent, according to Exhibitor Relations, which tracks the box office.

Multiples theories for the decline abound: a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough.

"Part of this is the fact that the movies may not have lived up to the expectations of the audience, not just in this year, but in years prior," said Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which had some flops this summer, including the science fiction action movie Stealth and the romantic comedy Bewitched. "Audiences have gotten smart to the marketing, and they can smell the good ones from the bad ones at a distance."

Even Robert Shaye, the studio leader behind The Wedding Crashers, one of the summer's runaway hits, shares the worry about the industry's ability to connect with audiences. "I believe it's a cumulative thing, a seismic evolution of people's habits," said Mr. Shaye, chairman of New Line Cinema.

In previous years, he said, "you could still count on enough people to come whether you failed at entertaining them or not, out of habit, or boredom, or a desire to get out of the house. You had a little bit of backstop."

With competition from video games, hundreds of television channels and DVD's, that's no longer the case, he said. The problem, these studio leaders and other industry experts seemed to say, was not only that a steady diet of formulaic plots, too-familiar special-effects vehicles and remakes of television shows has, over time, left the average moviegoer hungry for better entertainment.

Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal, said Hollywood has been too focused on short-term box office payoff and not focused enough on what he called "the most elemental factor of all" - the satisfaction of the moviegoing experience.

How to define that satisfaction is a difficult thing. Normally, the formulaic nature of Hollywood movies is something I find irksome at best and repellent at worst. I tend to go to Hollywood films only when I don't want to be surprised, when I want a totally predictable experience.

Sometimes it works very well.  I loved the The Wedding Crashers (with the exception of Owen Wilson's endless emotional collapse in the second half). But the whole Vince-Vaughn-tied-up-to-the-bed sequence cannot be seen as formulaic comedy writing! :)

Other times, it's like watching what the filmmakers think will sell, which has me feeling like a total sucker afterwards.

In my most cynical moments, I think Hollywood is in the trailer business; they come up with a few great ideas for two-second scenes in a trailer, and then try building a film around them.

To support that belief, I rely on my recollection of a Harper's magazine "forum" from about a decade ago, in which some people who worked in movie marketing talked about their craft over a Harper's-sponsored dinner. For them, their highest professional achievement was to make a crappy film open at number-one on weekend A and see it sink like a stone by weekend B.

(I once seriously pissed off a marketing colleague at one job by asking why someone would make it their life's work to get people to see terrible movies instead of trying to make good ones.)

But I really think when it becomes more about the marketing than the film-making, then things start to spiral downward from there.

And lest we think it isn't about the marketing, look at all the promotional campaigns tied into films, especially when the audience is kids.

That's another thing that artistically dilutes many films; they're being made with product placements and other commercial interests in mind to maximize revenue potential, not to create an interesting film.

I suspect part of the problem is simple economics is catching up with Hollywood. As films grow ever-more expensive to make, the law of diminishing returns kicks in; and producers and their backers become more conservative in the types of movies they will offer -- which explains crap like Bewitched, the Dukes of Hazzard, Herbie Fully Loaded and the Bad News Bears.

Call me a film snob, but I can't think of one person I know who I would even suspect of paying money to see the Dukes of Hazzard or Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Maybe if you're trapped on a plane or in some other quasi-hostage situation, you can be forgiven, but if someone admitted they did admit they paid their own money to see that sheit, I would be seriously in their face about it.

I really, really hope movies like those are tanking because the public is finally saying "enough."