Have sequels lost the plot?

It is a summer, movie-wise, to numb the senses. The multiplexes are presenting no fewer than 16 sequels, and things are about to get worse. In August alone, seven addons to successful popcorn movies lie in wait. Their numeric titles speak of their aesthetics, eloquently making the case that cinema is dead: Legally Blonde 2, Spy Kids 3D, Terminator 3, American Pie: The Wedding, Freddy vs Jason, Tomb Raider 2, Jeepers Creepers 2.

Maybe it's time to have a Requiem Mass for cinema. Imagine it - a huge gathering at dusk in Hyde Park, Bach's music blasting from the trees as cans of crass films starring American actor Adam Sandler are put out of their misery. Then movies by Douglas Sirk, Abbas Kiarostami and Howard Hawks are illicitly projected on sheets by people with passion and taste, like a cinematic Fahrenheit 451.

What caused the evacuation of sensibility from mainstream American cinema? The question is timely because it is exactly 30 years since the Hollywood studios first experienced the rush of blood that is the blockbuster mentality. In 1973, for the first time ever, a film took more than $200 million at the US box office. The success of The Exorcist was as shocking as its theme. Three years later, Jaws topped $260 million. Two years after that, Star Wars wiped the floor with it by taking $460 million.

Producers discovered that the new cinema of sensation was turning their business into one of exponential growth. Agog, they dumped real people for core neo-Freudian dreams: devils, sharks, space ships.

Movies became primitive and exciting again. New, colourful, hedonistic buildings called multiplexes were built to call forth the faithful. It has seldom been said, but what happened 30 years ago is that cinema underwent a schism. Competing beliefs about what it was finally parted company and two churches - those of sensation and contemplation - were formed.

Since then, many who love cinema have hoped for a reconciliation as each faction was weakened by the loss of the other. Intelligent films became ghettoised, blockbusters underwent death by formula. When Tim Burton crossed the floor to direct Batman in 1989, we held our breath for more of the new dynamic hybridity of the two approaches that we dreamed of, but it didn't come.

As recently as this month, arthouse director Ang Lee followed in Burton's footsteps by directing Hulk. The prospect of a new marriage of kinesis with thought and feeling didn't transpire, however.

Perhaps the two-churches metaphor explains why blockbusters are so brainless. They are a religion. If you are constantly chasing after a holy grail of total teenage awareness, then you will rigorously remove anything more adult. If you have built these megaplexes with pink neon, then you will make pink-neon films to screen in them.

Yet since 1990, for half the blockbuster era, film-making outside the Hollywood studios has had its greatest period ever. This has been the only time in film history when every continent has made great work. Iran led the way for the Middle East, but Australasia had Baz Luhrmann and Jane Campion, the former communist world had great directors such as Alexander Sokurov and Kira Muratova, China, Korea and Taiwan jostled for preeminence, Mexico and Brazil revived, Denmark stole everyone's thunder, the new realists in France were a blessing after all that empty 1980s gloss, and Senegal, Mauritania and even Burkina Faso produced splendid films.

So a Hyde Park Requiem is not needed. Cinema is more alive than ever before. The reason for concern is that the gap between greatness and awfulness is at its biggest.