Movies

Remember, this is and always has been intended as entertainment, not as epistemology or theology.

It's more just an issue of shit-writing versus good-writing.

And Marvel is one of the few companies that genuinely gives a shit whether people actually enjoy the content they produce.

I mean... eh? They definitely invest a ton of money in marketing their products. And that means a continuous blizzard of artificial hype, from highway billboards to internet blowhards. But this is still a Disney company. I'll throw you back to the old Eisner-ism. "We're not here to make art, we're here to make money". The Marvel Formula is downstream of the broader Disney Formula for making entertainment.

It's an assembly line that churns out The Product year in and year out.

Just look at 60+ year-old franchises like Doctor Who and Star Trek that got fucked by companies that really don’t give a shit for anything other than profit.

DW & ST were already very modular. I might argue the more story-arc driven updates to these franchises made them worse (even if the big arcs were the shows at their best).

But the Marvel serialized format was always a story-arc format. And these arcs were chained together to tell a still longer story. When Marvel's at its best, the story evolves over time. X-Men did this exceptionally well. They would kill people who stayed dead (mostly). They'd introduce elements in the background, like the Sentinels or the Legacy Virus, which informed the era of writing and the broad set-pieces of the franchise. They weren't afraid to do a bunch of spin-offs that were incredibly low stakes, rather than making every storyline existential to the entire planet/universe/reality itself.

All of that went away with the movie franchises. Everything had to be bigger than the last thing, which meant nothing could ever actually resolve in a meaningful way until the last scene of the capstone episode. And, even then, you had to do some kind of soft reset so that there's always a toy in the box that you recognize.

I don't really begrudge a media company for profit-hunting. I do begrudge media companies who put their stories on repeat mode, because they're too afraid to try anything that might not look identical to the last thing that made money.

RIP to the doctor. May their next regeneration be a good one. Or, at least, a better one.

Honestly, if you're being inundated with ads to the point it's souring you on the product, that's a you issue.

I use Revanced, Ublock, and Ecosia and I haven't seen an ad for anything more than a shitty mobile game in years.

Ecosia has a built-in ad blocker that works pretty well.