One of the factors that I hope will begin to get us out of the era of movies that have nothing going for them but special effects is the rise in computer power. At some point special effects have to become so cheap and easy that they stop impressing people. The problem is that I can see the next step in movie special effects is on its way and it will lead to another decade of movies that try to impress us with technology rather than story. What I think this next era of movie special effects will be is movies that are nearly or completely indistinguishable from other live action movies movies made by scanning in old movies and making digital puppets out of the characters. It is easy to give an example than explain. Imagine Citizen Kane, now imagine that you can scan it into a computer and remove Orson Welles from the rest of the moving creating a three dimensional picture of him from the film and create a digital puppet that can be manipulated just like a animated character. Now imagine that you can take the dialog he spoke and using the base sounds create any dialog you want. It's all pretty much possible now, it's just difficult to do. Now imagine a Hollywood executive that realizes that with this ability he can take Orson Welles and put him into a completely new movie doing and saying anything he wants and instead of paying one actor he can hire 10 computer techs. The good thing is that new episodes of older TV shows could be made this way. Imagine creating digital images of everyone from the original Star Trek TV series and being able to make new episodes that are completely different than anything they did before. It this point it would be little more than animation with photos instead of drawing but in 5 or 10 years they will have computer programs that could do a vast majority if not all of the acting as well. This would allow a programming language that would control every aspect of what appeared to be live action show. This could open up huge options for Hollywood if there were some creativity. Imagine being able to make a good movie and being able to cast any actor who has ever been on film for any part. The problem is that isn't what will happen. What we will get is Citizen Kane 2, this time it's personal.