Six months ago Jodie Foster gave her “Hollywood fracking” quote to Radio Times‘ Michael Hodges. The quote has stuck with me ever since, but I never mentioned it in this column. “Studios making bad content” — i.e., the explosion of CG superhero-franchise jizz-whizz bullshit eye candy over the last 12 to 15 years — “in order to appeal to the masses and shareholders is like fracking,” she said. “You get the best return right now but you wreck the earth.”

This trend, she said, is “ruining the viewing habits of the American population and then ultimately the rest of the world.”

I would amend that the viewing tastes of downmarket Millennials and GenXers were all but set in stone by the early aughts — they wanted their viewing habits to be ruined. By some kind of instinct or solemn decree or mass consensus they decided two or three years after 9/11 that traditional narrative drama (you know, the thing that began with the Greeks and Romans a couple of thousand years ago and had pretty much dominated until the late 1990s) had to be relegated to television and that megaplexes were by and large waiting to become high-adrenaline, theme-park experiences.