Hollywood, stop destroying cities – It’s as if Hollywood screenwriters know no other way to end a blockbuster.

In theaters Friday: Grown Ups 2, Pacific Rim

New on Blu-ray: Admission, The Host, Spring Breakers

I just watched the latest trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (pictured), and I’ve officially had it with all this destruction. Seriously. A mere 17 seconds into the trailer, and I am confronted with the first collapsing, burning building. Seventeen seconds.

The artistry of computer animation has evolved and accelerated to a degree that exploding skylines are just too easy to render. It’s becoming a filmmaker’s crutch. It’s one thing for giant beast on the loose action movies like Godzilla—or its modern equivalent Cloverfield—and natural disaster flicks like The Day After Tomorrow to feature mass quantities of urban destruction, but a regular action or superhero movie? Why? Too many are ending the exact same way: countless off-screen deaths—but the main characters are okay, so yippee—and a city center reduced to rubble. Man of Steel and Star Trek Into Darkness are the latest culprits, but they are not alone (hello, Transformers franchise).

It’s as if Hollywood screenwriters or their studio executive bosses know no other way to end a blockbuster than with mass amounts of urban explosions, buildings toppling into buildings and horrified residents fleeing in terror.

The marketing campaigns for Star Trek Into Darkness and last summer’s The Dark Knight Rises even featured similarly dark and destroyed cityscapes on their promotional posters, as if to tantalize audiences by saying, “Come see how the villain blew this [expletive] up!”

One shot from Man of Steel felt eerily identical to CNN footage of the one of the World Trade Center towers falling on 9/11, with the actors, much like the actual New Yorkers, running away from the steel and glass carnage and being enveloped in smoke and ash. Is this thrilling homage to real-life events or in poor taste? Why is it so often found in recent movies?

SPOILER ALERT: In Man of Steel, after block upon block of Manhattan is utterly incinerated by their aerial brawl, Superman defeats General Zod by getting him in a headlock and snapping his neck. There’s no narrative reason for needing the previous 20 minutes of gory fighting when this is the villain’s fate. So, if it is unnecessary to the plot, why include it?

The easy answer is that Hollywood likes money so it gives audiences en masse what those audiences want. But why does the average American want to watch something that so easily recalls a real-life and recent tragedy? Maybe putting that destruction into the context of escapism allows audiences a way to deal with it emotionally, so that we may more easily think “It’s not real,” or, “At least the heroes escape and save the day.”

If I were a psychologist, I’d delve further into that, but I’m a culture writer, so I’ll just say this: Regardless of Hollywood’s motives, or the outcome—intended or not—in the minds of audience members, seeing cities crumble in movie after movie feels creatively bankrupt, and, of course, numbingly repetitive.

But we need look no further than the tagline for Pacific Rim in the film’s trailer to know the mindset of Hollywood, to understand the pressure the industry is under to deliver at the box office in order to survive and to know the destruction porn arms race we now find ourselves in the middle of in 2013. Amid the marching of giant robots, the violence of invading alien beasts and the mayhem of collapsing skyscrapers, we are blasted with Hollywood’s new mantra: GO BIG…OR GO EXTINCT.

Pacific Rim opens wide Friday, July 12. Watch the trailer below: