Here's the deal- Marvel hit it big with its MCU and had everyone glued to its ongoing movie-line up through Endgame. And then it all fell apart. Have I watched an MCU movie since then? I guess? I saw Spider-Man and the new Dr. Strange. Maybe that's it? I skipped Guardians 3, Black Panther, Ant Man. Was Thor 4 part of it? I guess I watched that (but kind of regretted it). And at this point I'm pretty much out on the MCU. I've missed enough and I know they're going to do X-Men and Fantastic 4, and maybe I'll one-off those, but maybe I won't. But I'm pretty exhausted with the whole thing and know that I've missed out on a bunch of the inside stuff by not watching half of the movies this phase. I'm pretty indifferent to them now.
The reason I thought of this was that there's some new Star Wars series coming out, and I guess I could care less. I didn't watch past Season 2 of Mandolorian. I haven't seen Ashoka or any of the other series that are out. I watched, much to my great regret, the Boba Fett series. And honestly that's what made me quit. And so I saw a trailer for the some new series that talks about some characters that were players in some other series I didn't see and I realize: this has just passed me by. And I'm okay with that.
And I'm okay with not doing any of these big cinematic universes anymore. They feel like work to me. Want to do a trilogy? Great. That's about my tolerance level. But you know what's better than that? Stand alone movies in same universe. Although the Spider-verse is more bad than good- you don't have to watch all of them to watch a new one. I like that. Kenneth Branaugh's trilogy of Murder on the Orient Express/Death on the Nile/A Haunting in Venice is perfect. If you watched any one of these movies by themselves, you'd be satisfied (and they're genuinely good movies). The fact that they share a main character doesn't mean you have to follow his story-arc over the three movies.
Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man. But I feel like this is a phase of cinema that we're all going to think was silly twenty years from now.
Oh and another thing- movies should be 90 minutes long! You have editors for a reason! Just because you think you're a genius director doesn't mean you have to subject us to two hours and forty five minutes of your shit. 90 minutes! Unless... you're Denis Villeneuve. Denis: you can do anything you want and I'll watch it because you are brilliant. Everyone else? 90 minutes!