What's happening to the 3 act structure? Quoted in Variety, Oscar winner Marc Norman (“Shakespeare in Love”) says, “"I think there's a mistrust, especially among younger audiences, of traditional Hollywood narrative. I've never bought the explanation that people are growing up with shorter and shorter attention spans, and that's their notion of life. I have to think that it's deeper than that. It's a question of how can I get at a truth in movies that hasn't been done before?"
Of course independent films have long had all kinds of structure, the news is that this is reaching the more mainstream movies. Maybe it’s partly a result of how younger viewers use the media. Brian de Palma told Variety, “I watch my daughters, who sit on their beds with their computers on their stomachs, and they look at little pieces of this and little pieces of that, and that's how they get their information.”
It's good news for writers who tend to prefer less traditional story structure--and I'd guess that applies to books as much as it does to films.