It’s become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much — the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall.

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What’s really driving the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core constituency — young moviegoers — has evaporated. Poof! They’ve scattered to the winds. Young males aren’t just AWOL from movie theaters, they’re also not seeing the studio’s TV ads — either because they’ve stopped watching TV altogether, or because they’ve got the TV, iPod and IM all going at the same time — not exactly a situation in which an ad leaves much of an imprint.

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Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they’ve become wildly out of touch with reality….The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble — ahem, your customers — who spend $75 to take the family to a movie. —Patrick Goldstein —In a losing race with the zeitgeist (LA Times (will expire))