Likely Normal

Navigating a modern superhero movie has become less of a leisure activity and more of a part-time job that requires its own certification. You don’t just buy a ticket and some popcorn anymore; you strap in for a doctoral thesis defense on a fictional universe. The simple days of a single hero facing a single villain are gone, replaced by a sprawling, interconnected saga that demands you keep track of more characters, timelines, and MacGuffins than a CIA analyst.

For the dedicated fan, this is a dream. They thrive on the complexity. They’ll lean over in the theater and whisper, “You see that guy in the background with the weird ring? That’s a deep-cut reference to the 1987 ‘Alpha Flight’ comic run, which obviously sets up the coming of the Micro-Verse, which was hinted at in the post-credit scene of the ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Disney+ tie-in series!” You, who just came to see a guy in a metal suit blow things up, will nod slowly, your popcorn halfway to your mouth, wondering if you accidentally walked into a semester-long course you forgot to enroll in.

The movies themselves are now less standalone stories and more three-hour trailers for the next ten movies and six streaming series. The first act is catching up with old characters, the second act is introducing new ones who need their own spin-off, and the third act is a CGI light show that ends with a cliffhanger so dramatic it requires you to have seen a mid-credits scene from a She-Hulk episode you skipped because you were on vacation. The post-credit scene used to be a fun little Easter egg; now it’s a mandatory briefing for the next phase of corporate content, leaving you with more homework than you had in tenth-grade algebra.

Trying to bring your wife with you is a high-stakes gamble. Their innocent questions are landmines of your own making. “Why is that raccoon so angry?” they’ll ask. You’ll take a deep breath, realizing that to explain Rocket Raccoon’s trauma, you have to explain the Guardians of the Galaxy movies they haven’t watched yet, which also requires context from the Avengers, which is rooted in the Infinity Saga, and suddenly you’re 45 minutes into a lecture on the Sokovia Accords while the movie you actually paid to see is playing in the background. Their eyes will glaze over with a look of pure, unadulterated panic, and you’ll know you’ve lost them forever.

We’ve reached a point of peak complexity where you need a flowchart, a wiki page, and a psychology degree to understand the motivations of a man who shoots arrows. It’s a cinematic universe so vast it’s begun to collapse under its own weight, creating a black hole of continuity that not even Doctor Strange can escape. The ultimate villain was never Thanos or Darkseid; it was the overwhelming, needlessly complicated lore itself, which works flawlessly in 150 comics but falls flat on its face in a 90-minute film.