Once again the D.C. Comics bad guys at Warner Bros. have won, and the cultural pollution continues. The $20.5 million earned last night by Suicide Squad — the third-largest preview haul for a DC flick after The Dark Knight Rises‘ $30.6 million and the $27.7 million pulled down by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice — will translate into earnings of more than $120 million by Sunday night.

I’m not calling this the box-office equivalent of Donald Trump being elected president next November, but it’s clearly a similar dystopian scenario — another successful attempt by a very cynical and (to go by industry chit-chat) close-to-clueless team of studio executives, once again persuading the masses to stampede into plexes to see a film that most critics are calling bad, bad, bad.

Because right now they don’t care about alleged quality or lack of. They may hate it just as much as the critics by Sunday night, but right now they want to slosh around in yet another CG mud pit and revel in the anti-authoritarian swagger and buddy up with Will Smith, Jared Leto and Margot Robbie. Thank you, ticket-buyers, for strengthening the hand of Hollywood’s Vader-like comic-book mongers.