This has been true almost the whole time, with only occasional exceptions. They rarely take any chances on the themes (when they bother to have any of note at a

This has been true almost the whole time, with only occasional exceptions. They rarely take any chances on the themes (when they bother to have any of note at all), pull back before making any kind of point or taking any kind of stance on the rare occasions that they do, have mostly-terrible original music (and often make poor use of their soundtrack in general) which is why they've switched to just mining pop hits for soundtracks (a nice work-around for that problem, but it gets old after a while), and in terms of cinematography are oatmeal for the most part—bland and flavorless. There are endless YouTube videos analyzing essentially all of these failures. At this point they're on such a conveyor belt that they do a bunch of the CG before shooting starts or they have a final script. But, again, that's not new, they've been operating that way for a while. [EDIT] I write this as someone who's seen just about everything except a couple of the most recent films. To be clear, the overall project is pretty impressive, but part of why it's impressive is that they've managed to consistently be almost bad enough to be actually-bad, while still holding it together enough that they're not quite bad-bad, just... economical, profitable, and low-risk. And they do consistently manage to make entire films that hold together OK in terms of plotting, pacing, et c., which one might think wouldn't be impressive except... well, I'll refrain from mentioning my #1-with-a-bullet example of a high-budget recent-ish film (from Disney, even!) that completely fails at those basics to such a degree that it deserves to be studied in film class for its failures, for fear of veering into an offtopic flame war, but let's just say that's not a given so it's a bit impressive they've had essentially no complete face-plants over so many films.