Pity. 'Moon', 'Snowpiercer' and 'Ex Machina' were great at the cinema. They're not 'big' movies, but it just added a lot to the atmosphere. Though showings of the last two were absolute fuckers to find.
Then there's the well-recieved blockbusters like Mad Max, Instersteller, Inception, Gravity...
Yes, those are good movies.... I might not like all of them personally, but they have an undeniable quality to them. I'll even add Edge of Tommorrow even though I would never have thought of a recent Tom Cruise film as any good (the Japanese source as usual has been hollywoodized a bit in transition).
But I'm talking about the Super Hero action flick the last fifteen years.
Just like mid 90s-early 2000s was in grip of the bland Apocalypse flick where one seemed to be just like the other and all following the Roland Emmerich formula.
Since then, it seems the fad has been Marvel and DC pimping its IP. Maybe because the CGI can finally fulfill it to full potential. None the less, despite Iron Man being decent, I haven't anticipated any superhero flick since the Nolan Batman trilogy finished.
It's not that superhero flicks are inherently bad, but first few successful ones set the tone of what they HAVE TO BE like - at least in the minds of studios. And then that's nearly all you get for a long while.
You can recognize when the shit hits the fan when the sequel numbers ratchet up and quick (Fast and Furious director on this, need I say more?) Long a stapel of b-grade horror movies since the 70s-80s who continue doing this.
For all the daring and action these films display, the studios making them are extremely risk averse, fearful of touching the formula a bit. In the 50s and early 60s, this didn't manifest in sequels, but in extremely predictable by-the-numbers genre pieces that spooned the same junk weekend in and out until the modern film came out I'm guessing 1960s. Some people refer to this as zeitgeist, although I don't believe that's accurate.