Am I Jaded?

Or is Hollywood getting worse and worse? Or perhaps my taste in movies is changing, but I don't think so. Let me backtrack for a second.

My wife and I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes the other day, and pretty much all the trailers that played before the feature looked appallingly horrible. What makes this distressing is the fact that said previews were for movies that I though I would be interested in seeing, or that, a long time ago, I would have found interesting. Not so much anymore, and my question is why. I still like fantasy and science fiction. I still like comic books. I still like special effects, and I still like to be blown away by a movie that shows me things I've never seen before. And maybe that's where the problem lies: that everything those previews had to offer seemed like some rehash of something I've seen before. The previews that apparently made me so despondent were The Dark Knight Rises, Battleship, Men in Black 3, and John Carter of Mars. Let's look at each one of them in slightly more detail.

1. The Dark Knight Rises is probably going to be a cool movie; after all, the first two Nolan-directed Batmans were pretty fantastic. However, this preview, which, admittedly, didn't show much, looked lackluster and spectacularly uninteresting. Will I go see the movie? Probably, because I trust Christopher Nolan. Did this preview want to make me go see the movie? Quite the contrary: it made me want to run in the opposite direction.

2. Battleship is the movie version of the old game, which in and on itself is a stupid idea. I do like alien-invasion movies, though, but this one looks so generic and uninspired that almost made me cry in despair and disappointment.

3. MIB3 should have looked awesome. I love sci-fi, Will Smith, and time travel, and this movie features all three... and yet it looked tired, boring, and repetitive. And in case you're wondering, I did like the first two, but I always thought they could have been better.

4. I had been dying to see previews for John Carter of Mars, and even my friends had said it looked pretty awesome, but, what can I say? It looked, well... not too exciting or appealing, but at least it looked better than the previous three. Will I see it when it opens? I don't really know.

So why didn't I care about any of those previews that would have made me drool just a few years ago? Maybe I'm getting tired of the same meal being cooked and reheated time after time after time, or maybe I'm becoming movie snob who only likes quirky tales like Martin Scorsese's Hugo. I think the former is more likely than the latter, though, because I still enjoy big mainstream movies such as Sherlock Holmes, but I don't know. Does the same happen to you? Are you jaded as well, or is originality in Hollywood really experiencing a slow, painful death?