are movies more banal, half dimentional now?

Are we talking 3D movies or regular?

Not necessarily, and it would greatly help if you provided specific movie titles to support your premise. This broad open-ended topic may be the result of selection bias.

I don't see that.

I certainly see something like that happening with the majority of big budget Hollywood movies. Their budgets are completely out of control. It's David Foster Wallace's law of inverse cost and quality writ large.

But I don't see an overall 'safeness' or decline in quality. I certainly find enough to be going on with myself.

I think the basic economics of filmmaking have always been the same. The more money your film costs to make, the more money you need to make back. This has always meant bigger budget films can afford to take fewer risks and are generally less interesting.

But it almost certainly depends what interests you and where you're looking. No-one on Earth has a true, overall picture of the film industry. Because there's just too much media for any one person to consume.

The quality's dropped since Covid, while the levels of hype have increased. Same with TV. It feels like being gaslit sometimes.

It's give and take. The fact is, we have far more movies being ou.ped out now and the glut favors crap. Streaming wants content over quality.

Theaters are messy. The early part if this year sucked. The summer wasn't much better but people got deadpool and wolverine fan service, so they're hyped again. Beetlejuice was a flash in the pants. Alien Romulus was 2/3 of a movie. Long legs has good reviews but no one cared to watch it. Terrifier 3 is fun but people are annoyed with gore franchise (saw and hostel overdue it).

Honestly, if your noticing a decline in quality, reduce your witching to one day per week.

They look and sound great, with plenty of style -- but aside from being clever at times, most of the writing is subpar and not compelling at all. The best writing is still to be found within what's left of "Peak tv" and maybe an indie film here or there.

But as always, what's offered is a reflection of what the masses prefer to consume.

I feel like actors/actresses gravitate toward NETFLIX now when making movies because they can make a movie for 50 Million dollars with the actors/actresses getting paid $50 Million dollars for it too and they look very low budget. I feel like this is an effort to eventually attempt to do away with movie theatres in favor of home entertainment thanks to the Woke Virus??

Yeah, ever since streaming became a thing, I started noticing that people would make a big fuss about this movie or that movie, or this tv show and that tv show, and yet months after watching them, I wouldn't remember hardly anything that happened in them. It's like, all proper creativity and edginess has completely been lost in Hollyweird when it comes to story-writing. Even the Chinese they were pandering to have noticed this. That's how bad it is.