"It's silly to even try to deny this."
Nowhere have I denied this, nor the fact that Hollywood sucks.
"What does this tell us about Hollywood? "
That you & I both know they suck and are in agreement on this point?
"Not everyone is interested in watching someone get beaten for 3 hours over & over again. I personally don't go the the theater to get depressed."
But the Passion of the Christ was not about someone getting beaten up--that's a very superficial understanding of Gibson's film, part of the propaganda about it from the left. It was actually about the Crucifixion and the Christian concept of Redemption. So it had something major to say about one of the major religions on the planet, and did so in a way that was cinematically ingenious. Granted this would not be as meaningful to non-Christians as to Christians, any more than a film about the Holocaust would be as meaningful to non-Jews as to Jews. But thinking people of any faith should find such films of considerable interest just the same. The reward is in the aesthetics of such ventures, and in the intellectual insights gleaned. I am not Jewish, but Schindler's List was a disturbing and powerful film experience for me anyway. I thought about it for days. I can't say that I enjoyed it--but it did not depress so much as it evoked sober thought and enlightened--which was what it was intended to do. Such films are important and consequential--and should never be overlooked by the film academy.