Jordan Peele's latest is the sly sleek summer entertainment we were waiting for

Plus some Quick Bites as we head into the weekend

It’s Friday, July 29th, and here’s where we are…

Alan Horn’s return to Warner Bros is a big deal, but it also feels to me like the clearest sign yet that this town is in a death spiral. All they can do at this point is push the same handful of executives from company to company, shrieking “FIX IT!!” while they all just keep making the same homogenized IP slush and wondering why audiences are growing increasingly numb to all of it.

Yes, Alan Horn was a significant part of Warner’s success story during an important part of their history. And, yes, Alan Horn helped transform Disney into The Company That Owns Your Childhood in a way they never were before, and now they pretty much own the marketplace as a result. But there are only so many ways you can rearrange the deck chairs before the Titanic sinks, and none of them help with floatation. I don’t think the way this industry does business is long-term feasible. We are going to see a few major conglomerates survive that produce mega-scale branded “entertainment,” and everything else is going to battle for whatever market share is left. It’s going to get very, very weird out there, and the financial models that everyone’s been used to for the past few decades will evaporate. People are going to have to relearn everything about financing and production and ownership and distribution, and that’s going to open the door for some radical reshaping of who we hear, how we hear them, and how they get paid.

When the studios hit the inevitable brick wall once people get tired of the same IP on infinite loop and they don’t know how to cultivate original stories or voices anymore, it’s going to get very bloody very quickly. In some ways, I really admire Kevin Feige’s optimism, planning movies and streaming shows all the way into 2030. The fact that he thinks the world won’t just be a roiling sphere of wildfires and hurricanes is kind of adorable, but let’s play along. Let’s pretend we’ll still have electricity and a habitable ecosystem at that point as well as movie theaters. Sure. Why not?

But who is Marvel’s audience at that point and what do they want from the studio? It’s a question that they are doing everything they can to answer at this point, and I’m curious not just for myself as a viewer but for my kids. My oldest son was three when Iron Man was released. While he didn’t see the film, he saw the trailers for it, and the toys and things that the studio sent to the house were his. As soon as he was able to identify brands and characters, Marvel was right there, teaching him character names and bombarding him with new product. Tony Stark. The Hulk. Thor. Captain America. Black Widow. The Avengers. Loki. One by one, one building block at a time, Marvel laid out their bait and my kids took it, and I made sure they had access to all of it.

After all, they got to grow up with what I dreamed of as a kid, a perfect marriage of the things I loved. I remember having long conversations as a young teenager with my buddy Bill Rosemann about how these stories should be told or could be told on the big screen. I was movie crazy and Bill was comic book crazy and the middle ground between those things that we both envisioned drove us crazy. These days, he works for Marvel, making sure that their characters are the characters you recognize when you see them show up in games like Insomniac’s amazing Spider-Man series or last year’s justifiably-acclaimed Guardians of the Galaxy. Bill’s a perfect example of why Marvel is who they are, hiring people at all creative levels who grew up on these things. These stories have had a generational life now, and I suspect the movies’ success was driven by not only my generation’s excitement at seeing these stories brought to life but also our excitement at passing them along to our kids.

Now that Toshi’s almost 18, though, his interest in film has matured and while he still enjoys the Marvel films and shows he’s watching, he and his younger brother both have told me that they’re interested in seeing more kinds of films in the theater than just Marvel. They are hungry for other experiences, other styles, other stories, other worlds. If they age out of Marvel, then what does the studio do? I know my kids aren’t the only kids in the world and that they don’t speak for every kid, but we’re fifteen years into what is essentially one long story that has been told to them, and there’s never been a narrative juggling act like this before. Not on this scale, and not in a way that occupies this much of the marketplace.

Before Comic-Con’s Marvel presentation, Toshi and Allen both were largely skeptical about a T’Challa-free Black Panther sequel. Then this trailer landed…

… and they changed their minds quickly and completely. I’m excited to see Namor make his entrance, and it’s a reminder of just how deep the bench of characters who have not shown up in the MCU still is. It is certainly possible in a hypothetical sense to just keep telling new stories and expanding the cast of characters. There’s no reason they couldn’t do it for another 15 years… but does that really seem possible? Has pop culture really just hit this plateau where we can see the same commercial voice dominate the landscape for a decade? Or two? Or three?