The film's official release date, April 26, 2019, is a timeline marker. It's as big a deal as 2013 when Netflix released its first original series by a big-name filmmaker, "House of Cards," and showed that it could compete with traditional TV providers like HBO, Showtime, AMC, and the broadcast networks; 2009, when "Avatar," a digital-only 3-D epic, was released, spurring cinemas all over the world to junk their 35mm projectors and install digital projectors so they could show it; 1997, when "Titanic" set new standards for computer-rendered effects; and 1975, when the original "Jaws" was released simultaneously on 500 screens, a then-unprecedented number, and went on to become both the top-grossing film of all time (up to that point) and the first clear example of what we now think of as as a "summer blockbuster."

We all knew that things were changing, with Internet-driven culture absorbing traditional and clearly delineated media like movies, broadcast and cable networks, recorded music, books, magazines, and newspapers, and treating them as various flavors of "content," offered via "delivery systems" and "platforms."

But it wasn't always easy to see exactly how things were changing, or what the distant future might look like.

This weekend saw the release of "Endgame" and the premiere of "The Long Night," the longest and biggest episode of "Game of Thrones," the most lavishly produced fantasy series in TV history, and one of the last series that people watch as a group, episode by episode, week by week, experiencing big moments as a single unified audience. One is a movie experience that takes many of its stylistic cues from television. The other is a television experience that strives to be thought of as cinematic. Both are mega-entertainments that are meant to be experienced on the largest screen possible (theatrical or home) in the presence of others. Both will ultimately be viewed on the handheld device that (according to our own statistics) 65% of you are using to read this essay. They're just two more pieces in the content stream, bigger and shinier than all others, but ultimately things to discuss on social media, bond over, and quickly move beyond. The state of the art.

This is it.

This is where it was all leading, whether we realized it or not.

Before we get any deeper into the weeds, I need to distinguish between the actual product, i.e. the movie, called “Endgame” and the immense digital-industrial-marketing apparatus that surrounds it and pushes it forward through the culture.

They're two different but (obviously) related things, but having issues with the context of "Endgame" is different from having issues with "Endgame." I liked the movie, or the installment, or the climax, or whatever we're deciding to call this thing, a lot. "Endgame" itself is a heartfelt and satisfying experience, mixing affecting character moments and laugh-out-loud comedy with giant-scaled action sequences that spotlight dozens of established characters (the final battle is a splash panel come to life). I confess to going into it with folded arms. I disliked "Infinity War" (too crowded, too rushed and yet too long, too Thanos-centric for my taste). And I'd been somewhat entertained but generally unimpressed by most of the other MCU movies, except for "Black Panther" and "Ant Man," the first "Iron Man" and "Guardians," and the first two-thirds of "Winter Soldier" and "Thor Ragnarok." (The casts generally deserved better than the writers and directors they were saddled with.) But I was won over by the surprisingly relaxed, character-driven, self-aware yet sincere comedy that dominates two-thirds of this one. Much of the script suggests a laid-back Richard Linklater movie with superheroes, all hanging out and dealing with their PTSD, or maybe a very long episode of "Community," the NBC show that spawned the Russo Brothers, the MVPs of the MCU.