The movie, which opens in theaters Friday and is available on demand on iTunes, tells the story of Marley, a free-spirited young New Orleans advertising executive. Marley has good friends — including a pregnant lady and a gay black man, because she’s awesome. She has an adorable dog and a penchant for casual sex and whimsical bike riding. But no sooner can her pals offer a champagne toast celebrating the “youngest and hottest vice president” in her company’s history than things start to go terribly wrong. Like millions of helpless white people every day, Marley begins having visions of a cool African-American as God. There is no known cure. Once Marley starts chatting with Whoopi Goldberg in that ethereal, cloud-heavy set, you know she’s in trouble. She’s got terminal Movie Cancer. Naturally, this is the perfect opportunity for her to get in touch with her feelings, have many scenes of hugging her crying costars, and start banging Gael García Bernal. It’s a little weird because he’s supposed to be her oncologist.

It’s not easy making entertainment out of cancer. Yet Showtime’s “The Big C” has mined the terrain to Golden Globe-winning effect. Llast year’s “50/50,” based on writer Will Reiser’s real experiences as a young person suddenly diagnosed with a potentially fatal diagnosis, became a critically acclaimed sleeper hit.  And when you’ve got a condition that will directly affect roughly 41 percent of us, there’s surely some dramatic and comedic resonance to be found in the subject matter. Speaking as someone who has had Stage 4 cancer and endured a clinical trial, and who believes firmly that anyone who’s been through all that ought to at the very least get to bang Gael García Bernal in the Big Easy, I am the ideal audience for this movie. Why, then, somewhere around the inevitable shopping spree montage, did I scrawl the words “WORSE THAN CANCER” in my notebook, and then underline them fiercely in the darkness?

Maybe it’s the way Bernal, as a doctor with seemingly zero ethical problem about sleeping with his terminally ill patient, says “schmuck” – because he’s supposed to be Jewish. Maybe it’s because Kathy Bates, as Marley’s mom, looks like she’s trying so hard with such unforgivable material. Maybe it’s because the biggest audience laugh of the whole movie came when Hudson said, with a straight face, “Come on, Doc. Level with me.” Maybe it’s because when Peter Dinklage, as a male escort, says the title of the movie, it turns out it’s his character’s nickname. Little Bit of Heaven. Oh, human suffering. Truly, this is what it looks like.

Mostly, brothers and sisters, I think we know why this movie causes a pain all the medical marijuana in the world can’t make a person forget. It’s Hudson. Hudson, whose character ostensibly goes through chemo, yet never loses a bouncy curl off her blond head. Who enters a trial but quits with a shrug about “quality of life.” Hudson, who, thanks in large part to director Nicole Kassell and first-time screenwriter Gren Wells, willingly put herself in a movie about cancer that seems to have been created by people who’ve only had cancer described to them. Hudson, who chose to place herself in the pantheon of life-affirming doomed sick girls like “Sweet November’s” Charlize Theron and “Autumn in New York’s” Winona Ryder and the mother of them all, “Love Story’s” Ali McGraw, and comes across as a shrill, affected parody of her hair-tossing Almay ad persona.

It’s an occupational hazard that any actress with marquee value will sometimes find herself in romantic schlock. Yet women like Renee Zellweger and Sandra Bullock have managed to balance their turkeys with riskier performances and a broader range of films. Hudson, in contrast, has remained frozen in time, forever doing variations on her young rebel with a heart of gold, Penny Lane. So let us remember Hudson today not as the husk of an actress she became, endlessly subjecting moviegoers to lazy dreck. Let us remember her as bright, fearless Penny. She’d want it that way. Let us move on, and spare ourselves the ordeal of further films in which a daffy blonde flashes a megawatt smile and recites terrible dialogue and dances adorably even though she’s, like, dying, you guys. For truly, life is much too short for such trials.

All this is standard operating procedure in 21st-century Hollywood, where the industry is dominated by post-boomer males reared on the comic books, TV shows and blockbuster movies of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and the audience is understood in almost Pavlovian terms as a slavering horde of permanent adolescents. Audience familiarity and “pre-awareness” are greatly prized, so nearly all these guy-oriented movies derive from superhero comics or video games or other decades-old pop franchises. (It is, of course, possible to go too far into the pop-culture past. Let’s observe a moment of silence, once again, for “John Carter.”) We can certainly argue about which of these movies create an interesting twist on existing formula and which are cynical crap, but I don’t think we can argue that it makes much difference to the bottom line. “The Avengers” will make a kazillion dollars, and so did “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” The differences between the two are mostly a matter of fine-grained detail; they’ve both got cartoonish male bonding, a lot of stuff blowing up, and hot-chick eye candy.

If you’re female and you’re interested in any or all of the above pictures, by the way, I apologize for making it sound as if you don’t exist. But in marketing terms, you don’t. There’s no end of paradox in Hollywood’s patronizing attitude toward female viewers, especially given the long-held marketing truism that in a date-night situation, the woman’s vote typically holds more sway than the man’s. (It’s a standard sitcom joke, right? She persuades him to go see “The Notebook,” and he has to pretend he didn’t cry at the end.) But broadly speaking, women are supposed to be satisfied with the mid-budget, low-prestige romantic comedies made on the Hollywood margins, many of which are so phoned-in and formulaic — hello, Garry Marshall! — they make Michael Bay look like Fassbinder. (Actually, Michael Bay is kind of like Fassbinder. But let’s not get distracted.)

Of course, the Hollywood suits have no objection to making enormous piles of money off female moviegoers, whom they rediscover every few years. (See also: “Ghost,” “Pretty Woman” and the careers of Meg Ryan and Hugh Grant.) But even enormously profitable franchises like “Sex and the City” and “The Twilight Saga” exist in a sort of pink-hued ghetto, and are widely understood both inside and outside the industry as being silly and second-rate. As opposed to the movies about muscular guys in colored costumes who fight evildoers from outer space, which attract the biggest budgets, the biggest stars and the highest possible production values. When feminist critics argued, for example, that “Sex and the City 2″ received far more scathing treatment from male reviewers than did guy-oriented movies that were every bit as wretched, I at first resisted. I now think they were correct: Critics make allowances for dumb, macho action movies, because they conform to unconscious norms and expectations, in a way they don’t for silly, superficial “vagina movies.” I have long contended that if you construct a Venn diagram showing the best of the (universally derided) “Twilight” movies and the worst of the (universally praised) “Harry Potter” movies, there’s way more overlap than fans of the latter would easily admit.

All of this reflects deeply ingrained social and cultural ideas about gender, which are present in people of both sexes. Maybe men’s preference for violent action yarns and women’s preference for sappy love stories — and our tendency to understand one as more “serious” than the other — are hard-wired in some biological way, although that falls a long way short of scientific truth. But despite the torrent of male-centric franchise flicks we’ll see this summer, and next summer, and for all the summers into the foreseeable future, the tide in the Hollywood gender wars has begun to shift, slightly but perceptibly. As I said earlier, “The Avengers” will be No. 1 this coming weekend. But the top-grossing film for the preceding six weeks was a female-oriented picture: Four weeks of “The Hunger Games,” followed by two weeks at the top for surprise hit “Think Like a Man,” whose principal audience was not just women but African-American women, who make up about 6 percent of the United States population. (Clearly a lot of other people went to see it too.)

Those six weeks aren’t statistically meaningful by themselves. But when added to the big numbers rolled up last year by “The Help” and “Bridesmaids,” and the $1.7 billion taken in so far by “The Twilight Saga” around the world, they begin to suggest the contours of a new reality, one in which films aimed at girls and women are high-end blockbusters on an equal footing with guy-flicks. This year, “Hunger Games” will be somewhere near the top in global box-office returns, alongside “The Avengers” and Chris Nolan’s final Dark Knight film. While I don’t think “Hunger Games” is likely to be remembered as a cinematic breakthrough, it’s an important movie in other ways. Its canny blend of science fiction, action flick and love story nosed it out of the pink ghetto in various ways; it was presented by industry insiders as a high-stakes gamble and a worthy successor to the Harry Potter franchise, and male critics were mostly respectful, not reacting as if they were being flooded with icky estrogen. If the film’s audience was predominantly female, the film’s ethos — the cultural narrative surrounding it — was more butch.

Maybe it’s coincidental that two of the biggest female-oriented films we’ll see this summer — Pixar’s animated “Brave” and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” with Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth — are genre-mixing action pictures with independent-minded heroines. But when it comes to the sluggish, reactionary and massively over-thought process of making Hollywood movies, I don’t believe in coincidence. Some of you with long cultural memories may be wondering whether this could mark the beginning of a long-arc trend that brings us back to big-budget Hollywood movies that aren’t so niche-marketed and gender-specific, that are meant to appeal to all ages and both sexes. One answer to that question is “Hey, Tim Burton and James Cameron and Peter Jackson,” and another answer is “only sort of.” In the meantime, it’s business as usual: “Battleship,” which is based on “the classic Hasbro naval combat game,” will open directly opposite “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” which is based on a series of lecturey and divisive pregnancy advice books. I honestly can’t decide which one to see first.

How, then, do we account for the near-total segregation of the relationship comedy and the rom-com? If anything, “Think Like a Man,” the awkward but intermittently amusing black-centric ensemble film built out of comedian Steve Harvey’s self-help bestseller “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man” deserves a gold star for its generous portrayals of Caucasians. OK, it’s true that one of the white guys in the movie (Gary Owen) is your standard-issue ultra-square doofus, found in black-oriented movies since time immemorial, whose role is to serve as the butt of white-boy jokes and make accidental racist remarks that the black characters then acknowledge are partly true.

The other one, though, is Jeremy (Jerry Ferrara of “Entourage”), an unshaven, semi-unemployed dope who is one of the story’s central band of henpecked bros, and whose nerdy, bespectacled girlfriend, Kristen, is played by Gabrielle Union, arguably the most gorgeous of “Think Like a Man’s” bevy of beauties. (If I really wanted to go semiotic on you all, I would argue that Ferrara’s presence calls attention to the fact that race is a subjective category with no scientific meaning: He’s white, all right, but after a Brooklyn Italian fashion, and his skin is barely lighter than that of blue-eyed dreamboat Michael Ealy, who is black.) Anyway, nobody in the movie acts as if Jeremy and Kristen’s relationship is any sort of groundbreaking event, plus you get to see Union play the kind of woman who knows who Frodo Baggins is, and wears a Voltron T-shirt. Whether that’s in any way convincing is beside the point, given that any resemblance between “Think Like a Man” and anyone’s life, black or white or otherwise, is pure happenstance. But would a “mainstream” (i.e., predominantly white) comedy depict an interracial relationship so casually, even in 2012? I don’t actually think so.

Setting aside Jeremy and his impressive collection of early-1990s action figures — his conflict with Kristen, rendered in Steve Harvey-ese, is “The Girl Who Wants a Ring vs. The Non-Committer,” and you get only one guess about who ends up on his knees, blubbering, with a little box from the jewelry store in his hand — “Think Like a Man” is pretty much just “Valentine’s Day” or “He’s Just Not That Into You,” with the racial polarity reversed. Director Tim Story and screenwriters Keith Merryman and David A. Newman have to shoehorn four warring couples, several sidekicks and a whole bunch of random Harvey-isms into one package, and it won’t quite fit. (Women are invited to compare themselves to different varieties of fish at the end of an angler’s line, and cautioned: “Holding out for better is making you bitter.”) I’m not going to claim this is a good movie, in some Platonic-ideal way, but I enjoyed it more than I did those paler versions, maybe just because the music’s better, or because it’s fun to see all these undervalued black actors — Ealy, Union, Taraji P. Henson, Regina Hall, Terrence J, Romany Malco and the scabrous, hilarious Kevin Hart — cutting loose, even in a scenario as dumb as this one. (Yes, controversial R&B star Chris Brown is also in this movie, in a bit part as, and I quote, “an Axe body spray-wearing man-ho.”)

There are a few digs at African-American filmmaking titan Tyler Perry in “Think Like a Man,” as when one character describes the Perry formula: The beautiful woman gets dumped by a bad man and rescued by a good man, and they both find Jesus at the end. There’s no savior on hand here, and the dialogue is racier and more urbane than Perry’s. With the exception of Hart’s foulmouthed and down-home Cedric (whose estranged wife is played by radio personality Wendy Williams), everybody belongs to the acquisitive, upward-bound middle class. But in the larger sense this movie belongs alongside Perry’s work in the alternate universe of black-oriented entertainment, which not only continues to exist — as it has, in various forms, throughout American history — but may be thriving now more than ever.

This may seem curious at first. Many kinds of mainstream Hollywood movies, especially thrillers and action flicks, have gradually gotten more diverse over the years, which may reflect a white audience’s increasing willingness to root for heroes of color, but probably has a more pragmatic motivation. Anyone who understands moviegoing demographics will tell you that African-Americans and Hispanics are overrepresented — often dramatically so — among audiences for action-adventure movies, horror films and mainstream comedies. Giving those viewers someone “relatable” in the cast (I hate that word, but apparently it’s standard English now) is good marketing sense.

Love stories, however, work by a different logic, and a form of circular marketing logic kicks in. Here’s how I think it works, from Hollywood’s point of view: One nonwhite couple in the background of a mainstream rom-com is fine, and the sassy black friend dispensing advice is a perennial. But if you put an interracial couple in a mainstream movie, you’re making an apparent statement, and running the risk of alienating a handful of more, erm, “traditional” white viewers. (As I’ve said, “Think Like a Man” suggests that black audiences may be less skittish about this.) If you make the black couple too central, or push the cast beyond, say, one-quarter nonwhite, you reach some perceived tipping point, and it’s an “urban” movie, playing in Harlem and Oakland and New Orleans and South Central L.A. at the theaters that played “Red Tails” and “I Can Do Bad All by Myself.”

Now, there may be some insight about human nature here, in that people are always more likely to go see a love story about characters they can identify with (whatever that means). Or maybe it’s just a matter of bigotry and bad science. Very likely it’s some of both, I really don’t know. What I do know is that the film industry is always overly cautious in responding to social change. Remember that “Philadelphia,” in which the gay couple didn’t even kiss, was heralded as a breakthrough! And that black people will flock to movies like Perry’s or Story’s (he also made the 2002 hit “Barbershop”), even when the craftsmanship is indifferent, because they so rarely get to see their love lives glamorized or ironized on the big screen, whereas whites have gotten to see that happen every month of every year of the last century.

“Friends With Kids,” an enjoyable new indie comedy that marks the directing debut of writer and actress Jennifer Westfeldt (best known for “Kissing Jessica Stein” in 2001 and her recurring role on TV’s “Notes From the Underbelly”), has a lot going for it. But its excellent collective craftsmanship, its rampant dirty talk and its gloss of contemporary metropolitan morality only convey the appearance of novelty and flexibility, while in fact the underlying formula is as rigid as the sonnet. Like almost every rom-com of this epoch — and I’m including some more adventurous films that don’t at first look like rom-coms, including “Bridesmaids” and “Crazy, Stupid, Love.” — “Friends With Kids” is enslaved to a template established two decades ago by screenwriter Nora Ephron, first in “When Harry Met Sally …” and then in “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

I’ll get back to that, but let’s give Westfeldt her due for making this completely hidebound, moralistic and sentimental yarn feel somewhat fresh and contemporary. She writes snappy, risqué and often flat-out filthy dialogue, and her portrayal of married life and parenting among New Yorkers on the edge of middle age feels far more convincing and authentic than would be typical in a Hollywood product. (Several scenes in the film were shot in the Brooklyn neighborhood where I live, as it happens.) She has a terrific ensemble cast, many of whom worked together in “Bridesmaids” and are starting to look like a roving comic rep company: Adam Scott, Jon Hamm (who is Westfeldt’s husband and co-producer), Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd, Megan Fox, Edward Burns.

Westfeldt herself is an edgy, brittle performer; she’s interesting-looking rather than beautiful, intense rather than charismatic. That too is an admirable tweak, and pairing herself with Adam Scott — himself a longtime character actor who has rarely or never played the romantic leading man — proves ingenious. Westfeldt’s Julie and Scott’s Jason are supposed to be college buddies and confidantes, surrounded by a coterie of coupled friends, who are all moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn and popping out puppies. Chris O’Dowd and Maya Rudolph are the loud, rowdy, comic-relief couple, while Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig play somewhat against type as the dark and serious couple out of a Bergman film whose passionate relationship goes rapidly south.

Jason is a player who pursues short-term, highly gymnastic relationships with younger women and refuses to settle down; Julie’s a brooding romantic who got her heart broken by a jerk and can’t find a decent guy. But both are afflicted by ticking biological clocks, and apparently by the itch to spend countless thousands on private-school tuition. So they tell their friends they’ve decided to have a baby together, and of course the general reaction is relief and delight: We always knew you guys would be great together! And then Jason and Julie explain that, no, they aren’t together. They got drunk and did the deed, the old-fashioned way, but they’re not going to live together or get married, and they’re going to keep on dating smokin’ showgirls they pick up in Central Park (Megan Fox) or hunky, well-endowed and immensely rich guys they meet while speed-dating (Edward Burns), as the case may be. They’re going to be a never-married, or “pre-divorced” pair of amicable co-parents, and they’ll figure out something to tell the kid later.

And then — well, no, wait. Here’s my question: Of course I subscribe to the International Film Critics Code, under the terms of which I should tell you nothing more about the plot of this movie. But do you have even the slightest particle of doubt about what’s going to happen at the end of “Friends With Kids”? Or about the kinds of second-act and third-act reversals the two characters will go through, or about the scenes where one of them is alone in tears and another is alone and grim-faced on the rainy streets of Brooklyn, while whiny indie-pop plays on the soundtrack? (In a daring break from tradition, there actually isn’t a running-to-the-airport scene in this movie.) I mean, I guess you do have a particle of doubt, and I did too, because while you’re watching a movie it’s just human nature to imagine the possibility that it could end up resembling real life. But in another, more analytical part of our minds we understand that the doubt is, in itself, the desired effect, and isn’t to be taken seriously.

There are too many things going on here to tease them all out adequately, including Hollywood’s long-term cluelessness when it comes to making movies aimed at female audiences, and the fact that it’s only natural to want and expect a happy ending to a comedy. But the ubiquity, and tyranny, of the Sally-Sleepless-Mail model of romantic comedy is what interests me. Twenty-odd years after Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in Katz’s Deli, the rules established by Ephron remain essentially the same. As distinct from classic romantic comedy, the two lovers don’t have to be chaste; they can sleep with any number of other people, and even with each other, before reaching the final kiss. (Bi-curious exploration remains at the outer edges of rom-com possibility, but it wouldn’t, strictly speaking, violate the rules.) Their banter is snappy, frank and laden with semi-forbidden gags about politics, religion and sex; if in Ephron’s heyday a PG-13 rating was often sufficient, today date-night legitimacy requires a hard R.

I guess you can’t really expect Hollywood’s attempts to tart up the rom-com genre — such as the four sex-pals movies released in the last two years: “Friends With Benefits,” “No Strings Attached,” “Going the Distance,” “Love and Other Drugs” — to vary the formula too much. But while those movies ranged from surprisingly good to mostly worthless, only one of them (“No Strings Attached,” easily the dullest of the four) was a big hit, and that particular micro-genre has mercifully receded. What mystifies me, though, is that Jennifer Westfeldt is a genuine independent filmmaker, married to a rich and powerful actor who can pull strings and make things happen. She wrote this script herself without a studio telling her what to do, and whether out of fear or survival instinct or genuine affection for the strictures of the genre, wound up making a movie that essentially combines “When Harry Met Sally …” with “The Switch,” the summer 2010 flop in which Jason Bateman turkey-basters his gal-pal Jennifer Aniston without telling her. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that while “Friends With Kids” is a better film around the edges, the central couple in “The Switch” is funnier, better acted and way more romantically plausible.

I never thought I’d be holding up the 2009 “(500) Days of Summer,” with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, as some kind of cinema breakthrough. At the time, I thought it was charming and exceedingly slight. But, dudes and dudettes, how many other American-made rom-coms of the last decade have devised a happy ending that openly flouted the Ephron formula? (Yeah, I loved Greg Mottola’s “Adventureland,” which gets extra points for sweetness and for nailing its period and setting, but leaves the formula intact.) Is it worth noting that “(500) Days” earned back four times its modest production budget, while most of the other inflated Hollywood rom-coms I’ve mentioned made little or no profit?

Sure it is, sort of, but studios and producers learn lessons slowly, and only through the application of many millions of dollars. I bear “Friends With Kids” no ill will, by the way; by all means go see it. (In the likely-to-be-confused-on-Netflix category, it’s worlds better than “Friends With Benefits,” but not as good as “Friends With Money.”) But it’s not the answer to the question. Somebody’s going to have to write a romantic comedy in which something totally unexpected happens in the third act, leaving the Ephron template in ruins — and then turn it into an absolute, gonzo-palooza worldwide hit — before the 21st-century rom-com is unshackled from Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.