You have to love it when Hollywood is disappointed by a $30 million dollar opening. Why are they disappointed with such a hefty number? Because it was for Evan Almighty, the most expensive comedy ever made at $175 million (and that’s probably low-balling it).

For Evan Almighty to have had any shot of breaking even in the long run, analysts were saying it would have needed at least a $50 million opening. Why? Because they know the movie is crap and a huge number up front would be needed to offset the lack of word-of-mouth referrals and the fact that critics have already kissed it goodbye. This is exactly why you saw such a massive onslaught of ads for the film in recent weeks (I mean did anyone else see what was eventually an Evan Almighty special on NBC last week with the occasional Office re-run sprinkled in?).

Seriously, you can follow a simple rule-of-thumb to know if a movie is going to suck before it opens. Just watch any television channel in the weeks leading up to a major opening and see how many ads are running for it. If you can basically recite the entire movie before you’ve even seen it, you know it’s going to be bad.

And here’s the the thing, there is no good reason that Evan Almighty should have been crap. It’s the sequel to a decently funny and very successful Jim Carrey movie (Bruce Almighty), had a good premise (Noah’s Ark is always funny), and is featuring one of the hottest comedic actors out there, Steve Carell. But the studio in an effort to make as much money as possible decided to make an extremely vanilla comedy that could not be anymore PG. Even Bruce Almighty was at least PG-13.

Look at the box office charts for comedies over the past few years. What are the big hits? Wedding Crashers, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and the latest (and I think best) one, Knocked Up. What do they all have in common? All rated R.

Studios need to get this through their heads. While there are nothing wrong per se with PG movies, movies that should not be PG movies that are forced to be by execs who want films to open to as big of audiences as possible are always at best, worse – and at worst, crap. The best comedy evolves from real-life situations. Real life is not PG.

We’re going to see another perfect example of this (though in a different genre) in a few days when Live Free or Die Hard opens with its PG-13 rating (yes, you read that right). All three previous Die Hards were rated ‘R’ – I mean, is Die Hard not the quintessential ‘R’-rated film? Swearing, killing, marital problems. How does a movie with ‘die’ in its title become PG-13?

And of course the ads for the film have been running non-stop. Awful ads if I may say. It looks like a bad imitation of if Michael Bay were to direct a Die Hard film. I have absolutely no hope for and no desire to see this film in theaters now.

While Hollywood is realizing that they need to get content onto new technology spaces like cellphones with the iPhone rapidly approaching, I wished they’d also realize that adults like seeing movies too. How about you start making more for us? Maybe you’ll even make some money in the process.