Is 2009 the Most Depressing Year Ever at the Movies?

In the winter of 2008, Warner Bros. unveiled a batch of posters for what would become the second-highest-grossing movie of all time, The Dark Knight. The marketing campaign featured a silhouette of the Joker behind a glass door, scrawling these words in blood: Why so serious?

Somebody could ask Hollywood the same question. Fall movie season is usually the time when the studios haul out their dark dramas for awards consideration, but this year's batch seems especially bleak. The themes they touch upon include incest, murder, AIDS, cancer, abuse, layoffs, and lots of unexpected, tragic deaths (and we're not even counting the dead vampires in the Twilight sequel). This probably isn't just coincidental. This fall's slate was written at the end of the Bush administration, when most of Hollywood—at least the predominantly liberal part—was under a cloud of gloom. Now, we're all feeling gloomy; the economy is in tatters, and the unemployment rate continues to soar. Does anybody really want to go to the movies this year to feel even more depressed?


http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/popvox/archive/2009/10/09/is-2009-the-most-depressing-year-ever-at-the-movies.aspx