Marvel’s Infinite Formula

Watched the Fantastic Four trailer and felt nothing. Not anger or disappointment, just that flat recognition of, okay, here’s another Marvel film. The formula’s been stamped into everything: some comedy, action sequences that blur, whatever the actual story might have been gets buried under a quip about how absurd the whole thing is. Safe. Efficient. Dead.

Every Marvel film feels the same. Guardians, Captain America, Thor—doesn’t matter. They’re all executing the identical blueprint so smoothly that it stops being filmmaking and becomes factory work. I can predict the emotional beats before they happen. I know where the jokes land. By the third act I’m thinking about something else entirely.

The Jessica Alba Fantastic Four wasn’t good, but you could tell someone was trying. There was effort in it somewhere, misguided as it was. These new ones have abandoned that pretense. They’re just churning. And when they run out of new properties, they reboot the old ones and nobody even acts surprised.

The worst part is I’m going to watch it anyway. That’s what Marvel did to us—you watch them like you might half-listen to a podcast, half-scrolling through your phone. They’re engineered specifically not to demand anything. And that somehow feels worse than if they were just bad.