Your Lede:

The first big film of the year was about a monster who tramples a group of friends as they stagger through New York, which is on fire. Skyscrapers explode. The monster unleashes spawn that scamper through the subway, infecting survivors with an Ebola-like illness.

"Cloverfield" is 85 minutes of efficient grimness. Morgan Freeman does not offer comforting narration, as he did at the end of “War of the Worlds" three years ago. “For neither do men live nor die in vain," Freeman soothes in that Steven Spielberg remake. Amid the ashes: Affirmation!

Not this year. The message from Hollywood increasingly seems to be — to glibify it to a tag line — bleak is chic. Hopeless is hot.

[WP]

Also mention:

Wall-E was set on a “dead" Earth.
The Dark Knight is a “dystopian nightmare."
Cormac McCarthy. For last year’s No Country for Old Men and next year(?)’s The Road adaptations.
Borrowed quotes from interviews with EMMANUEL LEVY: “This was definitely going to be a genre piece," “Cloverfield" producer Bryan Burk told critic Emanuel Levy in an interview, “but we really wanted it to be about the people going through this experience, to make it an emotional movie."
And this one: “Yeah, it is grim," acknowledged “Dark Knight" director Christopher Nolan in Newsweek. “But Batman is a grim character. It’s a grim world. And that’s part of the fun of it — it’s operatic. It’s exciting."
And…"movie industry columnist David Poland" gives a quote!

Finally, a shitty kicker:

Miserablism. That’s the word. It’s artful. It’s attractive. And perhaps that’s the key to the chic of bleak. Why else do we click through photo galleries of shell-shocked stock traders, and California wildfires, and the latest unrests from abroad? Why else do studios cheerlead Oscar campaigns for titles as darkly blunt as “Doubt"? There’s something majestic about watching the suffering of people (especially when portrayed by great actors). And there’s something self-satisfying about sitting through a movie, however bleak, and enduring it, and declaring it beautiful and important.