Over the last decade or so, the entire movie movie business has been cannibalizing itself. The market is saturated with sequels, remakes, and adaptations of TV shows that no one on the planet was asking for. In fact, there's a movie coming out later this month that's based on a board game...a freaking board game!
Basically, Hollywood has become so risk-averse that they're unwilling to invest any kind of money in something that doesn't have built-in audience familiarity. And, as a result, we're seeing a huge decline in the overall quality of the movie marketplace, the Harry Potter movies notwithstanding.
This trend has been particularly hard on horror movies because, let's face it, there weren't a ton of good horror movies being made to begin with. By and large, horror movies are cheaper to make than other genres with mass appeal. Couple their low cost with a reliable audience of idiotic teenagers and adults who act like idiotic teenagers, and it's easy to see why there's a tidy profit to be made in the horror movie business.
