Based on the comments here, a key point of the article was missed. The quality of movies right now is crappy because it is being entirely driven by the international market, where they base things entirely on historical returns of specific actors and/or narrow genres. This shift to focus on international is due to the the loss of the DVD market. It's a lesson in how changing economics can impact the core quality of a product, not just "we're getting disrupted - damn the technology".