If superhero fatigue is a trend that became all too real, the making of the movies that brought it on might be likened to an addiction. The studios that produced those films got hooked on the idea that comic-book movies would be a limitless cash cow. And so they started to make them without limits, jacking up the budgets, the thorny interconnectedness of the characters, and the sheer volume of films they greenlit, each one promising — in theory — to be the box-office equivalent of Christmas Day. But it didn’t work out that way. For audiences, more turned out to be less. After a while, the sheer overkill of comic-book cinema began to look like it might kill the golden goose.

This summer, though, the release of two vital, game-changing superhero movies created a kind of Christmas in July. W

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