I soured on the superhero franchise business due to a combination of factors (the out of character Man of Steel, that first boilerplate Thor film, the ghastly Green Lantern, and finally reading Worm made everything else seem shallow by comparison) and have stepped back to look at it as an industry in a kind of spiral of intolerance to risk.

They want product, they want it on a pipeline, they want guaranteed returns and they do not want to gamble about it. This has been true for a long time but we're seeing a difference of degree here. Movie production is not merely evolving but speciating -- and I think the new species is going to look like a subscription streaming service (with tie-in product) that releases dopamine-tweaking algorithmic product on the kind of tick-tock schedule for which Intel longs.