It’s official: Hollywood has stopped making movies. Now they make trailers that are later adapted into full length feature films.

I have never seen more hype around a movie than I have for the upcoming Batman flick “The Dark Knight.” The movie doesn’t premiere until Friday and already it has the highest critical acclaim of any movie on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s been dubbed the best film of the year and Heath Ledger has posthumously been presented an Oscar. The writers of the movie are already stating in interviews which villains officially will not be appearing in the next sequel.

Between the marketing, trailers, exclusive online and televised clips and literally hundreds of interviews with cast and crew, we pretty much know the entire plot of the movie at this point. All that’s left for the film to do is fill in some gaps for us.

Of all the movies I’ve seen this summer, my favorites are the gems I found on Netflix from previous years. These were great films of the last 2-3 years that were not adapted from a successful trailer. Black Snake Moan, Funny Games, The Great Debaters, Vantage Point, The Talented Mister Brooks, Dan in Real Life, The King of Kong and even Jumper.

It’s not that I don’t want to see Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy 2, Wall E and even The Dark Knight. But let me SEE them before I see them. Give me a chance to at least enjoy the film in a proper context before we start handing out academy awards and working on the sequel.

Hollywood, you can blame piracy for all your troubles, but maybe if you stopped showing us the last page of the book first, and just let us READ the damned thing, we’d feel more satisfaction about the money we’re spending at the theaters.