If you make lots of money selling bazillions of copies of a mass-produced work that appeals to and entertains a large segment of the population, you're a hack who makes trite garbage.
If you make lots of money selling one work to one very rich person or corporation, you are a Fine Artist, and anyone who thinks what you made is ugly (which is very often a large segment of the population) is an uncultured fool.
There's a range somewhere between these two extremes where you make enough money off of your art that it pays your bills, but doesn't require you to cater to the whims of the catastrophically rich. I'm in that range and it's pretty nice.
I don't think serf is calling anyone wrong. Just that there is more to the arts than financial success.
It's ok to let people like the Marvel stuff, _and_ lament the fact that there is less effort going into making more interesting (from one perspective) movies.
That's like concluding McDonalds is the world's best restaurant based on having sold 1 billion burgers, or whatever the number is.
I do enjoy superhero movies to some extent, and many of them are very well crafted. The fantastical elements give actors an opportunity to go to extremes by dramatically upping the stakes. But even the well-made ones can tip into tedium or self-parody, full of stock characters collecting plot coupons and trudging through obligatory scenes. Once something turns into a franchise, it's hard to evade decline, virtually impossible to reverse it.
An interesting difference here is that part of the reason McDonalds is so popular is because it's cheap.
Writing pop fiction or making Marvel movies isn't cheaper than the "artful" variants (in fact for superhero movies it's much more expensive), and consuming isn't cheaper either, so there's more at play here.
It's not that cheap over here, they have a budget menu but you can get a cheaper 'big' burger at a local Independent restaurant that is likely to be much better.
For me what makes it popular is the consistency. It's something you eat when you don't want to explore some amazing local cuisine that you may either like or dislike. You just want to get something known.
McDonald's is never amazing but once you've had it you know what every next time is going to be like. And mediocre is better than bad. Also, they really have the fast in fast food licked.
Mentally it costs far less energy to watch a superhero movie than the deeper movies.
I like to watch movies that are for entertainment too, don’t get me wrong. Just want to point out that there is a different in cost to watch different movies, even when the amount of money I pay to watch them is unchanged.
Yeah, so? It is the best restaurant in the world, from the point of view of millions of people who go there.
I personally hate superhero movies and McDonalds, but to say that these are incorrect or bad in some way is to cast a (probably class-based) value judgement on something that is adding value to people's lives.
They're bad if they make it harder to access more complex experiences.
This doesn't apply to McDonalds, because a McD won't automatically kill off more sophisticated restaurants within the same area.
It does apply to terrible movies and books, because more creative and original projects don't get made "for commercial reasons" - which is really just a form of corporate enshittification.
The issue isn't just that they're bad culturally - although they are. It's that they normalise conformity and creative obedience through the principle that the mass market is the ultimate cultural authority.
When a majority of creators self-censor because "This will never sell/get made/be published/be listened to, what's the point?" - that is a very dangerous place to be.
You don't need to burn or ban books to destroy the values they represent. You can censor them implicitly by making sure certain values, ideas, and creative orientations have no cultural presence.
