Originally posted by: Han Solo VS Indiana Jones
What we need is balance, a healthy dose of both character driven films and larger than life spectacles. They must walk hand in hand, because one can never do without the other. It would be like having day without night or Superman without Lex Luthor.

Exactly. I mean, i love art-house stuff, its my bread and butter, but i definitly wouldnt want stuff like Star Wars or even "lesser" works like Starship Troopers to dissappear--and neither does the rest of the world. True, blockbusters are on the downward slide of their pinnacle circa 2003, and they will likely return to where they were around the mid-late 90's, right before the CGI craze went into full-gear, but they will never go away. And the truth is that the general public would rather see Lord of the Rings than Crash. Thats not necessarily bad, but smaller films definitly should get a bigger piece of the cinema pie. The problem is that the expensive blockbusters have the biggest budgets, and therefore the biggest distribution as well as the muscle of a major studio that basically takes up all the spaces at megaplexes while smaller films are forced to be shown at art-house and independent or smaller theaters. You have 7 out of 14 screens taken up by King Kong while Crash has maybe one--and Crash was a pretty widely released film for an independent flick. Most dont even make it to the chain theatres at all. Thats where the problem lies. As the world gets more screens we seem to be having less selection--because preportionally, the blockbusters still make up for 90% of the theater space, and to make things worse, people no longer venture to "alternative" or idependent theatres, they just expect that whatever is playing at the multiplex is all that is out so they only get exposed to the half dozen studio films that are out at any given time. Its an obscene domination. Fortunately studios and major distributors are embracing smaller productions and thats where the change we are seeing is coming from. The small distributions and independent films are just as obscure as they ever were but a select few are benefitting from being picked up by the indie-faction of major studios (like Focus pictures, for example) and are seeing the light of day in megaplexes.