Yeah, that seems to be the premise, but I really don't get the sense that movies, overall, got significantly more formulaic post-2005 (there was already a pretty major amount of sameness back in the 90s).
I do think that at the highest end of budgets there is less risk taking (because of the extremely high cost of a flop), and thus perhaps there is increasing adherence to the tried and true story formula, but I believe that has more to do with astronomical budgets than the publication of this manual and as I mentioned, I believe this trend started well before 2005.
See also: Big budget videogames, which also suffer from a similar sort of sameness, but without a widely accepted "How to Make a Big Budget Game" formula book.
“The closer you get to (or the farther you get from) your thirtieth birthday, the more likely you are to develop things like taste and discernment, which render you such an exhausting proposition in terms of selling a movie that, well, you might as well have a vagina.”
If you want to distribute online, sure. "Movie" is loosely defined: To get a showing in full-size theatre screens across America, for whatever that's worth, most indie/Youtube/Vimeo filmmakers don't have access, even for content that is vastly more popular than the bottm 25% of what does hit the cineplex.
Yup. And there is a great deal of interesting indie motion-picture making- YouTube and Vimeo have essentially torn down the barriers to distribution. Granted, very little of it is 90-120 minutes long, but so what?
I was taught something very similar in a screenwriting class in the late 1980s (it was in 10-15 minute increments rather than minute-by-minute, but still).
I do think that at the highest end of budgets there is less risk taking (because of the extremely high cost of a flop), and thus perhaps there is increasing adherence to the tried and true story formula, but I believe that has more to do with astronomical budgets than the publication of this manual and as I mentioned, I believe this trend started well before 2005.
See also: Big budget videogames, which also suffer from a similar sort of sameness, but without a widely accepted "How to Make a Big Budget Game" formula book.