100% quality drop, but it is due to the other reasons you listed.
VC has entered the industry, this is what media is now.
Watch the south park special that perfectly summarised why movies are declining. Pandering means watered down no risk projects that frankly are just a bit ass for everyone.
Quality fluctuates, there are good and bad years. During the pandemic there were very few actually good releases but this last year has been pretty great. Of course when I talk about a ‘good year’ I mean there were a handful of great releases, not that everything released was good. Most of new releases are trash (always have been) but you can happily ignore those if there are enough of the quality shows/movies.
The thing is both audiences and TV shows/movies evolve. Once you see something revolutionary it’s hard to go back to some of the old stuff that now feels stale or lacking. So in order to release quality content, I would argue, you actually have to do better every year.
Also, studios love repeating what works already. This grants them safe, repeatable profits, but reduces experimentation and means they release similar movies repeatedly year after year. Take a look at the Marvel movies since Endgame. I would actually say that quality hasn’t actually been dropping necessarily, (at least not on average) as many say. It’s just that the premise of a Marvel movie in 2023 is so boring and played out, everyone already knows how the movie will flow. But I think a 2017 audience would enjoy Guardians of the Galaxy 3 just as much as they did the previous movies.
Finally, Hollywood seems to love tropes. In the 80s and 90s it was macho action man, the 2010s we had a superhero craze, and this last decade it seems to be female empowerment. As with anything after a few years it starts to become stale and the best movies are usually the ones defying the industry because, as you said, fatigue sets in. (the 2000s seemed great in this regard I can’t really pin an overarching trope on them)
So I think the quality of cinema is increasing but so are our expectations. And we can get bored by seeing the same movie over and over again.
I dunno but im watching as much media as ever. Just not much current stuff.
