We can live in hope.

I’d like to think we’re turning a corner on this now - Lionsgate have taken a beating with both Borderlands and The Crow, which should make others think twice before just crapping out some half-baked adaptation, remake or franchise fodder. Disney have certainly learned their lesson, dialing back both Marvel and Star Wars releases to, hopefully, focus on quality not quantity. It’s clear that people just won’t turn out for more “content” and that they want to see something made by skilled creators who genuinely want to make the film or TV series, not some soulless corporate-mandated product. I’m confident that James Gunn’s approach at DC will also show the benefit of this approach (it’s basically just an extension of what he was doing in the MCU).

Almost everyone, including Kevin Feige, seems to have learnt the wrong lesson from the success of the MCU (that it’s all about the franchise and the IP) and it is now really starting to hurt their bottom line, which is the only stimulus they really understand. It’ll take a bit for the supertanker to course correct as it has a lot of momentum (so we will probably have to endure the seemingly endless Avatar films for a while) but it should lead to better blockbuster films and the cinemas being less carpet-bombed with franchise-fodder leaving room for lower budget films to have their chance to shine (and we’ve seen quite a few do very well recently which might encourage more studios to take a chance - your hit to miss ratio can be lower if you aren’t spending 100s of millions on a film).