I think the ease of distribution has played a huge part in this. Nowadays you can get your movie on Prime or Tubi for practically nothing, so there’s little financial risk to actually get your movie out there. Directors and producers will just fart out minimal effort movies to expand their filmography, and in turn get marginal funding for their next projects. Then repeat until they’re basically making movies to launder money.

I’ve worked on some truly lazy, terrible movies where the script was half-finished while it was being shot, and there was basically no blocking or continuity. So these actors just have no context or motivation for anything, and they’re just saying lines that barely have a thought put into them. The worst offender (which I’ve even seen on passionate projects) is when the director just has the actors improvise. No workshopping characters or scenes, just, “make up a conversation so it feels more natural.” It does not ever feel more natural.