EN: The Nine Act Structure Nonlinearity vs. Linearity revisited

or how to make sure you earn $100 Mio at the box office

With Cinema close to total collapse and - except for the DaVinci Code - no real hot (however you want to define this) movie in sight that could turn this years movie goers numbers around - its nice to see a website that has a simple formula that makes $100 Mio. The nice thing about it? Well if there is a formula already then there is an end of that formula near because you can not use the same layout of movies for ages until people recognize it as boring and never come back. David Siegel has a webpage up that explains how 90% of all "hollywood hits" are structured script wise. He calls it the Nine Act Structure and it is based on an eight year study of all films that have made more then $100 Mio while in theaters. Reading through the very short but extremely insightful description of his theory I come to the conclusion that he is right in his observation - the question now is: Is that a secret formula that all people enjoy?
His Nine Act Structure is based on the "Two Goal Structure" that says that the protagonist is having a changed goal in the middle of the movie to actually make the movie a little bit more unlinear. Unlike the "One Goal Structure" where the main character has a single future that is layed out pretty plain in the beginning of the movie and that has ruled over movies in the first 60 years of movie making. The successful trend now is to put one more branch into the storyline to "make it more interesting".
Now this is an interesting observation as it seems unexpectedly branching a story would make the story more intense. So is the "one branch in the middle" a compromise between going totally nonlinear and pure linearity? Is it a first step from mainstream moviemakers to go nonlinear in the future (like when the Two Goal Structure is boring)? Or is it the golden cut of movie making - something that stretches the attention span of the audience not too much but enough to make a movie interesting.
Seeing that more and more non-linear movies are entering the cinemas around the world I would suggest that the "Two Goal Structure" with its nine acts is a dying species already and that the future might even hold more nonlinearity wrapped in a linear casing - just watched "L.A. Crash" yesterday and that was a nice linear wrapper around a otherwise highly nonlinear structure in between. There was lots of tension and anticipation and the general layout worked. The point I am trying to make? I am still evaluating nonlinear vs. linear and I think the line to walk is somewhere in between. Too much nonlinearity will confuse the audience who might be already a bit shocked of the "other" experience to much linearity will take away freedom in the performance and might be too simple to create any nice tension or anticipation that a good movie should have - yes I do want to entertain a bit too.
So for now I am going with the "linear wrapper" with "open end" and seemingly random events inside form an environment that carries a message and a plot to carry the feelings.