I’ve been saying for a long while that superhero movies are a pestilence, and that the genre is more or less over in all senses of the term unless the superhero-film-in-question has been directed or produced by Chris Nolan or is named Thor or Iron Man.

I haven’t complained as persistently about mythological-medieval quest movies (wide-eyed innocents, cloaks, horses, shadowy forests) in the Joseph Campbell–J.R.R. Tolkien mode, partly because I feel that Peter Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings trilogy exhausted all that jazz. Whatever juice it might have left will be re-exhausted by Jackson’s two Hobbitt films. The genre is totally over, which is to say more or less relegated to the family trade (which has always been a kind of death).

Tens of thousands of Joe Popcorn-type guys are looking at this trailer right now and going, “Oh, God….another one. Well, I guess I can take the kids.”