The Atlantic Wire suggests that moviegoers are sick of Hollywood’s efforts to soak them by revisiting the same old concepts:

The numbers are in, and they show what studio execs likely feared and movie-goers likely suspected all along: Not a lot of people went to the movies this year. Box-office tracker Hollywood.com says that “an estimated 1.275 billion tickets sold” in 2011, a 4.8 percent decrease from 2010 making for “the smallest movie audience since 1995,” reports the AP. A hodgepodge of reasons for the sour showing were cited in the AP and ABC News reports. Among them: Too many sequels, too many kids movies, too many distracting gadgets, the bad economy, high ticket prices, and, something being called an “‘Avatar’ hangover” from 2010.

I’m not entirely convinced. Seven of the top-grossing movies in 2011 are sequels, and one, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is simultaneously a reboot of and a prequel to a popular franchise. The two that fall into neither category, Thor and Captain America, are part of Marvel’s grand Avengers product, and so while they were both handsome movies, are not exactly proof of Americans seeking out fresh concepts. You have to go all the way down to the 12th movie on the list, Bridesmaids, to find a feature that is wholly new, not based on a book, or unlinked to an existing project or franchise. Rio, Super 8, Rango, and Horrible Bosses are the only other movies in the top 20. Clearly, Hollywood’s having some real trouble selling original stories to American audiences, or for whatever, reason, finding original stories that it feels comfortable trying to sell.

The presence of Rio and Rango on that list also suggests that family movies aren’t completely the kiss of death—it’s that other movies weren’t catching hold with the teen and adult audiences in a way that would have pushed those family films further down the list. It makes sense that terrible kids’ movies like Mars Needs Moms would flop, and it’s always nice to see the market recognize stupidity when it sees it as happened there. But it’s really too bad to see a terrific family film like Hugo struggling to make back its production costs: the movie took $155 million to make, and thus far has hauled in just north of $45 million, and I wonder if a lot of that is because people are so sick of paying extra for 3D movies that aren’t particularly worth it that they’re turning away from a movie where 3D is used to brilliant, lovely effect.

It would be nice to believe that the two-year box office slump we’re seeing has an easily diagnosable cause, that studios could just sit up and say “Huh, audiences aren’t loving 3D. Let’s ditch the glasses and everyone will come back.” But there seems like a failure to connect on a more fundamental level. I don’t know that the formula for something like Fast Five is easy to distill and make use of in original features, though I will always take more movies with multiracial casts in which Dwanye Johnson acts somewhat hyperreal. And I don’t know what the best way to get audiences in theaters for some great movies that just went so wholly overlooked, like A Better Life. What Hollywood—and those of us in the seats need isn’t necessarily more blockbusters. It’s more deeply compelling mid-budget, mid-gross flicks.

George R.R. Martin, continuing his campaign to torture us with good things that are still far off, has a selection from The Winds of Winter online. There’s nothing exceptionally surprising about the information that’s revealed in it, but I appreciate the fact that we’re still going to be spending time in Theon’s point of view, however painful it is to be there:

My sister, Theon thought, my sweet sister. Though he had lost all feeling in his arms, he felt the twisting in his gut, the same as when that bloodless Braavosi banker presented him to Asha as a ‘gift.’ The memory still rankled. The burly, balding knight who’d been with her had wasted no time shouting for help, so they’d had no more than a few moments before Theon was dragged away to face the king. That was long enough. He had hated the look on Asha’s face when she realized who he was; the shock in her eyes, the pity in her voice, the way her mouth twisted in disgust. Instead of rushing forward to embrace him, she had taken half a step backwards. “Did the Bastard do this to you?” she had asked.

“Don’t you call him that.” Then the words came spilling out of Theon in a rush. He tried to tell her all of it, about Reek and the Dreadfort and Kyra and the keys, how Lord Ramsay never took anything but skin unless you begged for it. He told her how he’d saved the girl, leaping from the castle wall into the snow. “We flew. Let Abel make a song of that, we flew.” Then he had to say who Abel was, and talk about the washerwomen who weren’t truly washerwomen. By then Theon knew how strange and incoherent all this sounded, yet somehow the words would not stop. He was cold and sick and tired… and weak, so weak, so very weak.

She has to understand. She is my sister. He never wanted to do any harm to Bran or Rickon. Reek made him kill those boys, not him Reek but the other one. “I am no kinslayer,” he insisted. He told her how he bedded down with Ramsay’s bitches, warned her that Winterfell was full of ghosts. “The swords were gone. Four, I think, or five. I don’t recall. The stone kings are angry.” He was shaking by then, trembling like an autumn leaf. “The heart tree knew my name. The old gods. Theon, I heard them whisper. There was no wind but the leaves were moving. Theon, they said. My name is Theon.” It was good to say the name. The more he said it, the less like he was to forget. “You have to know your name,” he’d told his sister. “You… you told me you were Esgred, but that was a lie. Your name is Asha.”

I initially hated Theon—and it was hard not to. He was the character who was perhaps most invested in both the lies of the path and in the idea that the path to glory lies through conquest. But he’s become a moving testament to the lasting impact of brutality. And in this passage, he’s an illustration of how history gets mangled. It’s hard for people to believe the things that Theon is telling them about Ramsay Bolton because they’re too terrible, they’re the kinds of events and behavior that we all want to believe can’t be true. And living through the worst events of history can turn our most direct eyewitnesses into wrecks other people consider unreliable narrators.