There's a good chance that your favorite blockbuster film this summer ended with the fate of the earth saddled on its protagonist's shoulders. Screenwriter Damon Lindelof, who served as one of Lost's showrunners and co-wrote Star Trek Into Darkness, told Vulture that such a level of story grandeur is all but inevitable nowadays: “Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world."

Lindelof may be one of the culprits of that trend, but he's also one of the few blockbuster writers known for trying to make stories personal again. "Ultimately I do feel — even as a purveyor of it — slightly turned off by this destruction porn," Lindelof said. "In the old days, it was just as satisfying that all Superman has to do was basically save Lois from this earthquake in California." Most recently, his interest in smaller, more personal stories was used to rewrite the ending of World War Z from a massive battle into a tense character moment. Vulture has more on the circumstances around the film's rewrite, as well as Lindelof's thoughts on how Hollywood plots just can't stop escalating.