Business, not art

Call me pretentious, but I like standards in my movies. More specifically, standards of quality. Now I don't have a problem with the occasional movie that you just watch purely for fun, the kind that doesn't require any sort of mental activity on your part, but when a large percentage of movies that are coming out are mindless entertainment, it gets me worried. I'll be plain about it; those movies aren't art, they're marketing tools, trying to get your money as quickly as possible and they're very good at what they do. Sometimes I wish it were not the case, but I have to remember that it is the movie business. It's their goal to make money from their films. It's very rare to get a major filmmaker to take a risk in their work. After all, the more you've invested, the more you have to lose if it flops, so you take the well-established path to making money. Let's look at the Transformers series. It's pretty clear that as the series went on, they cared less about logic, story structure, originality, acting...you get the idea...things that are usually important. They just threw them away, and sadly enough, each movie made more money than the last. Are people so lazy and desperate to escape and that they'll go see the first CGI flick that assaults them with explosions and product placement? Is it that they don't know that better stuff is out there, or do they just not care? Should we be so easily placated?