It

was just not that good, and in particular the special effects were seen as muddy and crude, and that was a big problem because that's one of the things that Marvel is known for. They bounced back a bit with the Spring movie, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, which it okay, but like it did gross as much as Guardians of the Galaxy 2, so you sense those diminishing returns. But people liked it. And then with their most recent movie, The Marvels, it was just a disaster with the lowest grossing MCU movie in their history. And you know, critically it had some support, but it just seemed like people did not want to see it and didn't care anymore. I mean, this was really the year that, you know, like the sheen came off with Marvel. Like it was seen as unbeatable as just this juggernaut that would never end. And now there's a real question of how many years is this thing going to be, you know, the dominant force in movies? I guess it's important to say that like the more Marvel you watch, the more you maybe enjoy it because there are all these little Easter eggs for people who are super fans and have watched a lot of them, like characters will pop up and you'll only really know what they're doing there if you've watched something, two movies or TV shows before. Yes, you know, it's it's it rewards expertise. And that works for a major movie franchise only as long as there's a mass audience coming back for more. You know, when I talked to one of the writers of Avengers Endgame, which was their biggest movie, and he described going to see it in theater and seeing all the people like cheering for specific things that you would only know if you'd saw the X number of movies that came before. And he said something to me like it's preaching to the choir, but the choir is nearly global. You don't have to cater to people who don't care about Marvel because enough people do that you can have blockbuster after blockbuster after blockbuster with people who have seen everything and know everything or know enough to follow. And I think you got to the point where it actually was a little too complicated and hard to follow what was happening. You had to watch, you know, the Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney Plus to understand what was happening and like Black Panther II or whatever. I'm just grabbing things out of thin air. Please don't correct me. But, you know, it got a little much for some people. It got to feel like work. And already Disney is scaling back significantly. You know, what comes out of the content faucet. Was Jonathan Major's character King? Was

that

designed to kind of address some of the issues you're saying are inherent to Marvel movies? Like maybe a lack of depth or too much chaos? In a way, yes. Because I think, you know, the way that the Marvel universe started, which was so exciting, was that they would introduce, you know, a hero, a different Avenger in each movie, and then they all came together for the movie The Avengers. So awesome. Then the next phase was introducing some more characters. And then they all come together. And this even bigger team for The Avengers in Endgame. After that, the storytelling seemed to lose a lot of focus. Like, you know, the stories went in a lot of different directions. And they didn't have that same sort of momentum building up to a new thing. I think that's one of the problems that people have had with, you know, the last couple years of Marvel. And it has seemed diffuse. And Kang was potentially a way to sort of boring people together again. And one of the Avengers movies that is being planned is called the Kang Dynasty. Potentially, like Thanos, he could have been like a sort of central antagonist that brought all these different strands together to, you know, defeat him. Do you expect to see a Kang movie coming out? I mean, that's the big question for Marvel fans. What are they going to do? Are they going to find a new Kang? Are they going to find a new supervillain?

Now that it seems like

Marvel Star may be fading a

bit,

audiences aren't coming,

is there some new thing that's looking to take its place, some new place

where the energy and Hollywood is going?