There's an article in Wired News by Jason Silverman, which starts with an interesting premise: the scarcity of good science fiction at your local movie theater. The writer correctly notes that because of the huge budgets required to provide the necessary WOW! factor that sci-fi movies require to blow its audiences out of their seats, it's that much more difficult to get a film like 2001 or Blade Runner green-lighted in Hollywood's current challenging environment:

Why has Hollywood stopped making serious sci-fi? According to Gordon Paddison, New Line Cinema's executive vice president of new media and marketing, it is all about risk and money. Paddison described Hollywood financing as formula-driven: Films with the potential to travel well across borders score the highest points.

"Sci-fi is hard to fund -- it's never a slam-dunk," said Paddison, who helped launch campaigns for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He also said the system is geared toward films with huge effects.

"Regrettably, there's a barrier to entry," he said. "You have to put a certain level of budget into these films. You have to swing for the fences, otherwise you just aren't in the game at all."

If sci-fi has always been hit-or-miss with studios, investors these days seem less willing to gamble. Who knows if The Terminator, for example, could have gotten the green light in this environment? It was made in 1984 for $6 million -- the kind of midrange budget that rarely exists any more -- and starred a little-known weight lifter with an unpronounceable name.

Star Wars, a monumental struggle for George Lucas to produce, would likely be a non-starter these days. Blade Runner? Perhaps too dark to get financing. And 2001: A Space Odyssey? With its cast of unknowns, enigmatic ending and (in inflation-adjusted figures) more than $50 million budget, it just wouldn't compute with today's backers.

Unfortunately, Silverman undermines his argument with a sentence that's a combination of both political correctness and an "Everybody Knows" mentality:

As for the audiences? If they'll flock to the theaters for Al Gore's PowerPoint lecture, you'd hope they'd show up for good, smart, science-based fiction.

But they didn't flock to the theater's for Al's PowerPoint lecture: An Inconvenient Truth grossed a paltry $23,808,111 at the box office, which the author could have found in about five seconds by simply by looking up the film in the Internet Movie Database. While that gross is no doubt a nice return on what is probably a tiny documentary budget, it's less than Tom Cruise's salary.

In addition to the leading man's costs, there's the budget for the rest of the cast, Industrial Light & Magic's special effects, building the sets, location shooting, and a thousand other expeneses. Add it all up, and you reach the same conclusion that New Line Cinema's executive vice president makes in the quote above--that Hollywood is pricing itself out of business.

Tthere's another element as well. Earlier this year, Libertas described one of Hollywood's current business models:

Hollywood has recently perfected a formula whereby low-budget, indie-looking films generate good reviews, controversy, and oceans of free publicity (a lot of it coming from the conservative media) due to a film’s left-wing worldview. And all this free buzz gets translated into box office dollars.

The model Hollywood’s following here is that of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s $6 million film from 2004 that generated $222 million in worldwide boxoffice. “Fahrenheit” opened a lot of eyes in Hollywood - but not about George Bush or Iraq. Those bulging eyeballs were staring at “Fahrenheit”’s grosses.

One company that’s adopted “Fahrenheit”’s model is Participant Productions, founded by eBay’s Jeff Skoll. Participant co-produced “Syriana,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “North Country,” and soon will release the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and Richard Linklater’s adaptation of “Fast Food Nation.” None of these films cost very much (”Good Night” cost only $6 million), and are easy films to sell to the sort of people who read The Huffington Post or The Daily Kos. Crazy as this may sound, this business model is increasingly making sense in Hollywood’s competitive marketplace.

So here’s the bad news: Hollywood doesn’t need the Heartland anymore. There’s basically no pressure for Hollywood to change what it’s doing, because there are plenty of Blue State audiences and DVD sales out there to make even something like the gender-bending “Transamerica” a hit, so long as the film doesn’t cost too much.

But that formula also tacitly demonstrates that while films like An Inconvenient Truth may keep the industry alive in some form for the foreseeable future, they make it that much more difficult to repeat, say, the summer of 1982, when Star Trek II, E.T., and Blade Runner all played in shopping mall multiplexes.

Hollywood is alienating its Red State audiences with films like Gore's, which are not only comparatively little seen compared to the average blockbuster, but demonstrate to the moviegoers who don't count themselves amongst the faithful how predictably slanted to the left Hollywood has become.

And in that long run that can't be good for business--or Hollywood wouldn't have had to adopt the Fahrenheit formula to begin with.