Do we get the movies we deserve?

Step into any darkened cinema nowadays and watch the parade of coming attractions: you can’t help noticing that nearly all the main previews are about superheroes, or animated creatures, or oversized sci-fi with bone-crunching visuals. There may be a romcom or two thrown in for good measure, but that’s about it.

We are now, it seems, reduced to a paucity of entertainment choices, judging from movie trailers, and it’s time to analyze what this situation really says about society in general.

We know that Hollywood is grasping at straws in many ways. Ticket prices keep going higher to maintain box office receipts, even as audience numbers dwindle. Internet downloading is rampant, adding further to the drop in movie attendance. Television quality has gone up, conversely, providing yet another distraction from the silver screen.

Yet technology promises a kind of “third act” to Hollywood: more and more impossible things are now quite possible onscreen, thanks to CGI, and 3D occasionally merits its hype in a few vehicles worthy of the glasses (Hugo, Life of Pi). Moreover, technology has even greater luster in Asia, which — counting China and India alone — will make up the majority of the world’s movie viewers for decades to come.

So is technology the cure? And if so, what’s the disease? Why have cinemas been invaded by superhero franchises over the past decade — so much so that future generations will have a field day writing tomes and dissertations on what ailed this particular era of humankind such that they had to turn to comic book heroes to distract them from reality.

An easy answer to the arrival of the Marvel and DC brigade on our screens season after season is money: such movies and franchises draw patrons, a fan base that’s grown way beyond the nerdy ComicCon crowd to include a wider demographic. Or so the box office returns tell us.

This is simple economics: if Hollywood earns enough bucks from blockbuster superhero schlock, or any reasonably successful franchise, chances are repeating the formula will justify the cycle. Just look at the top 10 worldwide movie grosses from last year:

1. The Avengers ($1.5 billion)

2. The Dark Knight Rises ($1.08 billion)

3. Skyfall ($1.02 billion)

4. Ice Age: Continental Drift ($875,195,725)

5. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ($824,820,000)

6. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 ($813,906,000)

7. The Amazing Spider-Man ($752,216,557)

8. Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted ($742,110,251)

9. The Hunger Games ($686,533,290)

10. Men in Black 3 ($624,026,776)

Of this 10, three are superhero sequels, two are animated children’s movies, one is a fantasy prequel, one is a sci-fi comedy sequel, one is the first in a trilogy, one is the conclusion of a trilogy, and one is 007.

All of them represent franchises.

It seems Hollywood will jump onto any blockbuster bandwagon, if the box office is right. There were the numerous biblical epics of the 1950s (Ben Hur, The Robe, The Ten Commandments); then there was the “disaster” movie cycle of the ‘70s that began with Airport and spread out to earthquakes (Earthquake), capsized ocean liners (The Poseidon Adventure) and burning skyscrapers (The Towering Inferno) among others.

What we’re in now, and have been mired in for over a decade, is a new cycle: the “recycle.” It’s not simply that Hollywood is incapable of risking money on films that break the cycle (even if the occasional non-franchised material, such as Inception, actually makes money); it’s that they are reliant on a viewer appetite that is being fed by a growing TV mentality: everything delivered in seasons, in cycles, in sequels. We modern TV watchers, this generation that will not stand still for watching Homeland or Boardwalk Empire or Game of Thrones on a weekly basis, instead seeking out torrents and marathoning the day away, have developed a certain unquenchable thirst for instant gratification, followed by the next hit.

This may be why the yearly arrival of superheroes in sequels feels oddly satisfying to young, modern movie viewers: it feels a lot like watching TV. What young TV viewers look forward to most of all is “the next season” — an oddly optimistic view of life. And what young TV viewers fear the most is that their “show” will be cancelled; there will be no more.

Fortunately, Hollywood has them covered.

But this hasn’t addressed what we get out of this invasion of bigger-than-life movies. What particular pleasure do we derive from watching repeats, reboots, sequels that are 20 feet tall on the screen? There have long been techno geeks in Hollywood — the George Lucases who promise better sound and light; the James Camerons who promise a brave new world of 3D — sounding the call for technical mastery. Now those geeks have come home to roost: Avatar’s huge box office justified Hollywood pushing a lot of its chips into 3D releases, just as Star Wars stirred Hollywood to go bigger, louder and dumber back in 1977. (Eighties movies were practically a decade-long hangover of big-budget explosions wrapped in high concept brought on by the post-Star Wars binge.)

Now techno geekery calls the shots in nine out of 10 movies being made (again, refer to above list of top grossing movies in 2012). Among the trailers I recently viewed, perhaps the most bone-crunching of all was for the upcoming Pacific Rim, a Guillermo del Toro-produced sci-fi about sea monsters battling tough guys in big robot suits. Even with the typical Hollywood one-liners thrown into the mix (Tough guy in robot suit: “Let’s go fishing”), the sheer CGI-crafted scale of the thing makes human engagement seem strangely untenable. This is a movie that is made to overwhelm you, to make you feel there is no resisting its scale.

And that, to me, is at the heart of the technology boom in the movies. Hollywood has always been about flimflam, because repeat business is way better than coming up with something new each year. So if movie franchises like Transformers can make movie viewers cower in awe before the magnificence of creaking metal and towering behemoths not once, but three times, then that’s the way to keep ‘em in their seats. Call it the Michael Bay Effect.

But it goes beyond mere technology. Does the rise of fantasy worlds and goth romance in the guise of The Hobbit and the Twilight series speak of people’s desire to escape into alternate realities, or merely into comforting platitudes? Does the return of superheroes like the Avengers and Spider-Man or 007’s latest profitable reincarnation merely reflect society’s desire to see the world’s vexing problems “solved” on the big screen? Or is it a desire to subsume our lives into something larger than ourselves, a role religion once occupied?

Without engaging in pop psychology, it’s no secret that Hollywood has been all about peddling “the great escape” since its beginning, in a past century punctuated by wars, dire economic times, and (locally) martial law. People have always gone to the movies to escape. In Depression-era Germany, they watched “documentaries” like Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and felt overwhelmed, even drawn by the massive scale of the Nuremberg Rallies. (Talk about persuasive media.) And even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, average Americans saved their pennies to watch glitzy musicals filled with rich people living lives they could only possibly imagine on the silver screen. Now Americans prefer to save their pennies and watch the Kardashians elevate vacuity to an art form on TV, for free. But the truth still stands: movies represent something to make us forget for a few hours. Our movie memories may evaporate faster than Alcogel on our hands, even before the final credits stop rolling, but for that 120 minutes or so from when the lights go down until they come up again, people will gladly pay to see something outside of themselves.