The trend has been pretty clear for the last 10 to 15 years. You’re getting junk summer hits like ‘Transformers’ and good ‘smaller’ films like ‘Juno’, but there’s not a lot in between that’s aimed at adults. What we’re seeing less and less of is films like ‘The Godfather’ or ‘Chinatown’, i.e. ‘big’ films aimed at adults.
I like smaller films like ‘Juno’ or ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, but the days when the studios were willing to invest in well written ‘big’ adult dramas are fading (and have been for a while).
I don’t really think they’re fading. It’s the schedule. The “big” adult pictures are also generally considered Oscar contenders, Oscar contenders try to release very late so they’ll be “fresh” in voters minds coming vote time. So they mostly get a wide release in December or a limited release in December (gotta be on a certain number of screens by Dec 31 to be eligible) with wide in January. “Adult” movies released in March and April are dump zone movies, things they didn’t think would do that well but they made them so they might as well juice some money out of them and hope the focus groups are wrong.