While studios jockey (and sometimes bicker) for position as the box office champs of the weekend or the biggest comedy of the year or whatever, it’s important to maintain some perspective. As this New York Times story shows nothing aside from 1997’s Titanic comes close to any claim as an all-time box office hit when you adjust the grosses for older films for inflation. They might be great now but they’re small potatoes in the history of cinema.

Then you have the fact that this summer, despite some hype-filled headlines and breathless claims to this, that or another title, is not turning out as well as studios hoped. Pirates of Caribbean 3 is not doing as well as Disney would like and seems fated to be the weakest installment of the three. And the other tent-pole movies this summer have dropped off quickly after their opening weekends.

If I were running a movie studio, I’d rather have five films that cost $20 million to make and brought in consistent ticket sales week after week than something that cost $500 million but faded after two weeks. But that’s just me. See I would likely put more focus on making a movie than making a marketing opportunity. I’m crazy like that.

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune is wondering why Once from Fox Searchlight, which features just a few conversational F-bombs and no other objectionable content, is rated R. Such a rating, of course, limits the audience and creates a stigma around the movie.

The answer, of course, is that the MPAA’s ratings board thinks bad language is the end-all-be-all of cinematic sins. Sex, of course, is next but violence is way down the list. You can blow someone’s head off and get a PG-13 but if you swear while doing it you’ve earned yourself an R.

No, this makes no sense. But the entire ratings system is kind of completely broken. There needs to be a massive overhaul of the process so that truly objectionable content is restricted from young audiences who are impressionable and largely incapable of making such distinctions on their own. But if you’re keeping rationale adults from seeing an adult-themed movie you’re just being silly.

There’s also the belief held by many (including myself) that the MPAA is overly harsh with ratings for smaller, non studio flicks. The thinking is that, since the big studios pay for the MPAA’s operations and smaller ones don’t, the MPAA lets them get away with more to protect their market share.

Comics2Film reports that at least one owner of a comic book shop is not thrilled with Warner Bros. and their marketing techniques. The studio, as I mentioned before, had been sending teams equipped with all-Joker decks of playing cards to comic shops and releasing the cards in the store as part of the campaign for The Dark Knight. The owner of that Chicago shop was non-too-pleased that the team was cluttering up his nice, clean store and even defacing the sidewalk in front of the store to the point where he called in the city’s graffiti-busting team.

Yeah, it’s a good idea to know who your target audience is but not a good idea to honk them off.

Major Hollywood players and exhibitors are tapping into the power of 3-D to express themselves, reports The New York Times.

Theatrical features are being re-purposed for 3-D exhibition and new films are being shot in the format. While other studios have dabbled, Warner Bros. and Disney are the studios to most fully jump into the three-dimensional pool. As the article states, this is hardly anything new, with its roots back to the 1960’s and B-movies that sought a hook to make themselves attractive to teenaged audiences bored by more mainstream fare.

And there you have why this is becoming popular again. The home video experience is increasingly mirroring what people used to only be able to get in theaters. So studios are looking for new ways to lure people out of their homes. 3-D does that, especially when, as some movies have done, there is additional or different footage offered exclusively at 3-D presentations.

If studios and exhibitors can create 3-D cinema as a subsidiary business they can continue to offer a viable alternative to people looking at their various entertainment choices. It’s an experience that, at least for now, cannot be replicated in the home, much like widescreen presentation was created to differentiate movie going when TV was introduced 50 years ago.