The success of Die Hard paved the way for plenty of movies with similarly average protagonists stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time (Nicolas Cage in The Rock, Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, even Gordon Freeman in Half-Life), and they all ruled, except for The Rock, which only kinda ruled.

Instead, They're Making ...

The Everyman Action Hero is dead. He was killed and replaced by Jason Bourne, and I don't know if we'll ever get him back. Audiences, apparently, no longer want to watch a good, average cop who happens to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time; they want to see impossibly tough/smart/resourceful/cool supercops. They want Jason Bourne, or that other guy who isn't Jason Bourne, but is still mostly Jason Bourne.

This.

Just look at the movies that have been coming out. The whole Harry Potter franchise is based around Harry being the special chosen one. The biggest films of the year have been superhero movies. Skyfall featured maybe our Jason Bourniest Bond ever. The Hunger Games is about another "chosen one," a girl who happens to be the greatest archer alive and supernaturally great at surviving. Django Unchained's Django was immediately the fastest gun in the West. And so on and so on. We don't want our heroes to be good; we want them to be the best. Hell, even McClane in Live Free or Die Hard (and, based on the trailers, the upcoming fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise) is more Jason Bourne than John McClane.

Even our Die Hards aren't Die Hards anymore!

I'm sure this is just a trend that will pass and we'll get back to movies with Everyman Heroes just as soon as the world gets sick of Jason Bourne; I just hope it happens before they can do a gritty reboot of Fletch starring Jason Statham as a Fletch who can do back flips and punch through walls.

(aka Superman)

Even though I'm not a huge fan of the character, I'm a big fan of Richard Donner's Superman. It's exactly what a Superman movie should be: It's got Superman, Lex Luthor, some other stuff, a bunch of really good Supermanning, a cute-as-shit Lois Lane, truth, justice, and the American way. Simple. Fun. Exciting. Bright.

Instead, They're Making ...

Superman, only, not really. Gritty Superman. Zack Snyder's Superman, which looks like this:

Is that really what you're wearing?

Grrr! Roar! Scary! Grit! As we, as a movie-going nation, get older, it looks like we're mistaking too-cool cynicism and ironic detachment for maturity and sophistication. Everything -- everything -- is gritty now, even Hansel and goddamn Gretel, even Jack and the goddamn Beanstalk, even the Wizard of goddamn Oz. Everything.

When did optimism become a bad thing? Modern filmmakers are bent on taking popular, existing properties and bringing out the darkest and grittiest aspects they can find and making that their story. When directors look at a character like Superman, they're not saying, "Hey, I'd like to tell a story about this guy in blue and red spandex who loves America and punches bad guys and smiles and is handsome!" They're saying, "Sure, Superman, but what makes him angry? I want to focus on the stuff that depresses him, I want to see Superman as a badass. What if Superman was a dick? That's the movie I want to make, because even though I'm making a Superman movie, I don't actually care for the character. My name is Zack Snyder."

Superpowers are just as cinematic as fishing and beards.

And it's not even Snyder's fault, or anyone's fault, for that matter. In 2006, Bryan Singer tried to make a genuine, honest-to-goodness Superman movie, and what happened? Everyone hated it. For whatever reason, simple plots with good guys who are just Good and bad guys who are just Bad don't work for us anymore. It's not enough that your hero fights for the American way; he needs to be tortured, psychologically and emotionally, and his villains need to be complex and subtle. If your hero doesn't have some tortured past or dark secret, your audience will hate you.

The Scary Movie franchise has no heart. It's a series of pop culture references and dick jokes (and, yes, I'm aware that that sentence also can be applied to my entire career/personality). Mel Brooks would look at what was good and bad about a genre and shine a loving spotlight on both. Scary Movie will hire Lindsay Lohan to get in a car accident, look direct to camera, and say, "Not again!" which might not but probably does happen in at least two Scary Movies. The few times I've tried to watch anything in the [Blank] Movie series, I had to give up quickly, because every scene looked like this:

[EXT. Day- A FART NOISE is heard.]

A Wayans Brother: Daaamn. Now THAT's what I call a Big Momma's House!

[We see someone dressed like Martin Lawrence as a woman in Big Momma's House]

Big Momma: Oh no you didn't! Now where's my Austin Powers?

[We see Austin Powers. Actually Austin Powers. Just him, Mike Myers as Austin Powers, not deconstructing or commenting on anything, they just got him for this movie.]

Austin Powers: Don't you mean Lady Gaga?

A Wayans Brother Dressed as Lady Gaga (in a Bill Clinton voice): I did not have sexual relations with that Charlie Sheen.

Charlie Sheen: (To camera) Busted!

This bothered me for a long time. I didn't know WHY we started dumbing down our spoofs, why we stopped doing parodies and started just rolodexing timely pop culture references and boner jokes, but then Abelman, one of our forum members, had a fairly convincing theory. He acknowledged the fact that all of the formal "parodies" are shit, and he thinks that the reason we aren't doing smart genre parodies anymore is because we can't. Because Hollywood is obsessed with reboots, and the reboots are doing the parodying themselves:

"Looking at a movie like Star Trek, one sees real characterization developed and a new story told that nevertheless spoofs some of the old tropes and infuses the film with some tongue in cheek humor."

That's Abelman, and he's right. There's no reason to do a Star Trek parody today. If I was going to make a Trek parody, I'd make jokes about red shirts, or I'd call attention to the fact that every time a complex scientific point is brought up, it's followed up by a really dumb, simple metaphor to explain it to the audience (a common Star Trek maneuver). But I'd have no reason to do EITHER of those things, because both of those jokes were already made in the Star Trek reboot. Modern Star Trek is already winking at old Star Trek, Die Hard 4 winked at Die Hard 3, and Superman Returns winked at the whole franchise. You could try to spoof popular action movie tropes, but why do that when The Expendables is basically a series of references and jokes about action movie tropes already?

When the opportunity for deconstruction or spoof is already taken away by reboots and big Expendables-esque team-ups, there's nothing for the spoof genre to do but rolodex pop culture references and dick jokes.

And when that happens, there's nothing for me to do but complain. About everything.

Or, I guess I could just keep rewatching Die Hard until this whole thing blows over. I'll probably do that.