It's a total joke to say that movies got worse after the 20th century. The problem is when you think back to the 1970s or the 1990s, you only remember the good films, you forget about all the bad ones--and the simple truth is that almost every film released in both of those decades was either poor or mediocre. But where are these films? You've never seen them, or you forgot. If you look at a typical year on IMDB there are so many bad films that are either unseen or half-forgoten, but at the time they would have been filling the theatres. But then a decade later you back at the era with rose coloured glasses and go, "oh yeah the 70s, Godfather, Cimino, Lucas, Taxi Driver, man those were the days." But those represented less than 10% of the total studio output in the decade. Most of it was garbage. It's like that with any decade, although some are better than others.
Take a typical year like 1998. If you went to a theatre that year, this is what was filling up all the spaces and making all the money:
-Mercury Rising
-Firestorm
-Lost in Space
-Godzilla
-Spice World
-Hope Floats
-Hard Rain
-I Got the Hook Up
-Six Days Seven Nights
-Jane Austen's Mafia!
-Leathal Weapon 4
-Dance With Me
-Snake Eyes
-Rounders
-Holy Man
-Armageddon
-Urban Legend
-John Carpenters Vampires
-Practical Magic
-Home Fries
-I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
-Meet Joe Black
-The Waterboy
-Patch Adams
-Soldier
-You've Got Mail
-Stepmom
These movies are all taken from the weekly top 10 box office that year. These were among the most popular films of 1998; probably half of them you can't even remember anymore, although I think I have seen every single one of them. They're not all bad, but they're all pretty mundane in the long run. But when you think back to 1998 you don't remember these films, you remember: American History X, Saving Private Ryan, The Big Lebowski, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Truman Show, Thin Red Line, Life is Beautiful, Shakespear in Love, A Simple Plan, Rushmore, Pi, Dark City...sounds like a pretty good year for movies wasn't it? But those films represent only a small fraction of what was out there and what people were seeing. And when you look back at 2010: Black Swan, True Grit, 127 Hours, Social Network, Winter's Bones, The King's Speech, Inception, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Toy Story 3. Goddamn, sounds like a pretty spectacular year for the movies, I'd say better than the "best" shortlist of 1998. Yet somehow the fact that there's grossout comedies, action blockbusters, chick flicks and other poor films is supposed to make it better than the year that saw Lost in Space, A Night at the Roxbur, Firestorm, Holy Man, Leathal Weapon 4, Spice World and Stepmom.
That was one thing I really liked about George Lucas's Blockbusting (the book) central premise: blockbusters didn't begin with Michael Bay, didn't begin with Jerry Bruckheimer and Top Gun, didn't begin with Star Wars or Jaws, but have been there throughout every single year the motion picture business has existed, and to think otherwise or that 1975, 1977 or 1997 represented some new "turning point" is to look back at the past with rose tinted glasses.