While I was waiting for a press screening of Supergirl to begin, annoyed to have trudged all the way to the way west side of midtown in close, damp heat, some guy—the only other person in the screening room at the time, because I get to things too early—turned to me and said something I couldn’t hear. I paused my podcast (Who? Weekly; listen!), took out an earbud, and said, “Sorry?” He smiled and repeated himself: “I’m going to the bathroom. You need anything?” He was making an off-color joke, I realized, to a complete stranger, and in the generalized Tuesday frustration of the moment, I could only offer him a withering chuckle before I put my headphone back in and tried to disappear. 

I don’t want to besmirch this one particular guy too much for trying to be friendly, but something about that minor encounter got under my skin. There I was, waiting to watch yet another superhero movie, being accosted by one of the many nerds and geeks and dorks who—at least in the beginning—willed this all into being. I suddenly felt so sick of the whole thing, so tired of attending countless screenings filled with hooting fanboys, loudly yammering ahead of the movie about this junket and that one, about teasers and post-credit scenes, about their experiences seeing other nerd shit at other private screenings as if they were exchanging trading cards of experience.

It’s just been such a long time that we have had to endure, seemingly every few months, another trip into these dorks’ realm—which, for 15 years, became everyone else’s realm, too. I had let myself stupidly hope that the middling receipts for Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts (and The Marvels, and Eternals, and Black Adam, etc.) would have magically stopped this all from happening anymore. But instead Supergirl is only the first of three major superhero movies this year, soon to be followed by the next Spider-Man movie (whose trailer promises exactly zero plot) and, in the fall, Avengers: Doomsday, one of the more desperate plays for continued relevance clunking about the industry at the moment. (I’m sure it will make tons of money.) 

At least last year’s Superman, off of which Supergirl is spun, was a lively, surprising pleasure. James Gunn, mastermind of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies (two of which are among Marvel’s best), decamped to DC and winsomely revived a character that Hollywood had been struggling to get right since Christopher Reeve’s first adventure. But enjoying Superman was bittersweet; fun as it was, its success would mean another six years of Winter Soldier. 

I want every movie, minus a very small few, to do well at the box office; cinema needs all the financial boosting it can get. But the slight fading of superhero supremacy has, I must admit, been a heartening phenomenon, one for which I have quietly rooted. Look what havoc the dorks have wrought over the years—to say nothing of their counterparts currently plotting the end of the world in the Bay Area. It would be quite nice for their reign to be over, at least in some symbolic way, and for Hollywood to be forced to come up with new stuff to do. But that victory is still a ways off, I’m afraid.