The U.S. cinema box office continues its long decline. New release Tower Heist finished below expectations, coming in second behind returning champ Puss in Boots. The Brett Ratner-directed Tower Heist got relatively good reviews—69 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes—but the good reviews and star power of Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy failed to propel it to the top spot, earning just $25 million while Puss brought in $33 mil.

The other new release, A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas, finished third with an anemic $13 million, in the low range of what industry insiders were predicting. This is a period when films don’t do nearly as well as at peak times, but revenues were 4 percent lower than the corresponding week last year, and ticket sales were 5 percent lower, according to Hollywood.com.

Should those numbers continue their decline, it would be very bad news for Hollywood, of course. It seems likely that the high-concept/low-realism fantasy-action film fad is losing steam, as is the over-the-top grotesque comedy (evidenced by the tepid response to the latest Harold and Kumar film, which brought in almost 15 percent less than its predecessor, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, in its first weekend, in a time of higher ticket prices). The industry has yet to find anything to replace them and lure audiences back to the cinema. Romantic comedies and animated comedies are still doing all right, but it may be just a matter of time before they, too, begin to pale.

The industry has weathered audience inroads by television in the past, and the current decline does not seem directly connected to any such radical technological changes. It seems more likely that the cause is the type of films Hollywood has offered in the past couple of years.

As I have noted often,  contemporary U.S. audiences do prefer their cinema to be somewhat escapist, and they dislike most overtly political films of recent years. But there is, after all, a middle ground between fantasy and propaganda: basically realistic but dramatically intensified stories. That was the kind of filmmaking that Hollywood continually purveyed from the 1910s to the 1950s, and it seems likely that producers and studios that can successfully recreate that approach will do well in the months to come.

Thus, films such as True Grit and Moneyball may well point the way to a revival of the American cinema. We can only hope so.