Okay, in no particular order:

The Criterion editions of The Rock and Armageddon go back to the laserdisc days; it's just that I'm finally getting around to writing about The Rock. My thoughts on Armageddon are here. Re: The Social Network, this is as good a defense of the film—and description of the way it feels to watch it—as any. I don't think you'll find it annoying.

You're right about the Coen brothers; it's not like they got forced to make Garfield movies (even if Bill Murray thought they did). That wasn't a particularly well-thought-out thing for me to have said.

But let's talk economics, because I still think you're underestimating the costs of making a one-off two-hour movie. If we're going to talk specifically about The Social Network, well, David Fincher does spend a surprising amount in post for things that don't look like they cost anything (e.g., the almost-entirely-CGI San Francisco in Zodiac, or Armie Hammer playing both of the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network). There are certainly cheaper ways to do these things, but it's not just built-in price inflation because it's a feature. And the minute you tell Fincher he can't have his tilt-shift helicopter shot you're making a different movie than The Social Network. That doesn't address your larger point, that I'm disguising arguments about quality in arguments about economics; I'm just saying that the cost of that particular movie isn't entirely because of overpaid actors, directors, &c.

I also think it's easier to do a high quality production if you are working in episodic TV instead of making a made-for-TV movie, and this skews some of the perception of how good TV drama can be. There are one-time costs (character models? animations? I don't know anything about computer game development) that Telltale spreads over six episodes of an episodic game, right? The Mad Men producers only have to build the Sterling-Cooper set once, and they can use it for years; the same goes for the boardwalk in Boardwalk Empire. I still think for a two-hour, one-off story, television alone doesn't yet offer enough revenue to do a really quality production. I could be wrong about that, but stigma or no, I have yet to see a made-for-TV feature-length film that really floored me. (Episodic tv, yes, yes, a thousand times yes). Maybe that's a function of lagging economics and it'll change. I hope so!

One other thing: the studios don't just judge the films based on their first weekend, they've structured their deals with movie theaters so that they make all their money on the first weekend. For large openings, they can get as much as 100% of ticket sales from the theaters for the first weekend. After that, the theater gets to keep a steadily increasing percentage of the ticket revenue, more each week. So a movie that opens badly but has great word of mouth and runs for months doesn't make the studio as much money a movie that everyone sees in the first week but everyone hates. The economics favor movies where the studio can get as many people in as quickly as possible, no matter how bad the movie is, and to hell with the next weekend. That means spectacle films, and films targeted at audiences that will go see a movie opening night, not two weeks later, which means young people. If the ticket revenue were evenly shared for however long the film ran, I think you'd see (more) different kinds of films getting made.

Re: chicken shit & chicken salad, I guess I phrased that badly. I don't think that people have been tricked into thinking Transformers 2 is a good movie. I think they've been tricked into thinking it doesn't matter. (Honestly, it's part and parcel with what you talk about when you say we've all been trained to see through marketing hype: see David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction for more on that. I definitely see the difference between a movie that tries to tell a story and a thrill-ride; I wrote about it when writing about Armageddon. I just think if that's what an audience is looking for, they should at least be looking for a good thrill ride. I get a lot of people don't care whether a movie is any good (the box office results would seem to indicate this), but I don't feel bad about being condescending about it. If it's not stupidity, it's in the same ballpark. Incuriousness?

But your larger point, that I'm ignoring the fact that good movies keep getting made, and that a lot of what I'm saying amounts to whining that people aren't buying tickets to the kind of movie I like, you're absolutely correct—point taken. I expect there will be movies I'll love this year, just like every year before.