Some time in the middle of Avengers: Age of Ultron, I came to terms with the fact that there will never be any more decent Marvel movies. In fact, there can’t be.

Some of what I have to say is going to read as genre snobbery. So let me get this out of the way: I fucking love stupid popcorn movies. They can be about superheroes, dinosaurs, aliens, a bus that can’t slow down; I’m not picky. Movies are unparalleled in their ability to portray scale. If you have a giant screen, huge speakers capable of blasting everyone with earth-shattering noise, and hundreds of people gathered together in the dark, you can — and should — occasionally use those tools to provide pure, overwhelming spectacle.

So I don’t object to Marvel, or to Avengers: Age of Ultron, just because it’s not an artful, subtle little movie. That’s part of it: A pop-culture intake comprised of nothing but big spectacle is just as bad for you as an all-cheeseburger diet. But if I wanted to see something artful, I could have gone to watch Ex Machina or whatever that new David Cronenberg movie is supposed to be. I didn’t. I went to see Avengers on opening weekend. What I really dislike about Marvel is what they’re doing to stupid popcorn movies. This is a genre I care about, and they’re fucking it up.

A stupid popcorn movie by Joss Whedon has every reason to be a great experience. I’m no super-fan, and he’s done things that are pretty dreadful (if you’ve never seen In Your Eyes… look, do yourself a favor, don’t see In Your Eyes) but silly fun is his wheelhouse. Cabin in the Woods is hardly an intellectual little art-house film, yet when I saw it in theaters, my friend Kelly and I left the theater gasping and whooping with exhilaration, as if we’d just gotten off a roller coaster. For at least ten minutes after that movie ended, the only thing we could say to each other was “OH MY GOD.” It was pure, stupid adrenaline, and it was wonderful.

Moreover, Whedon has a remarkable gift for taking extremely silly subject matter just seriously enough to make you feel something. He’s not Christopher Nolan or Zach Snyder, thank God — no movie posters that look like Trent Reznor threw up in a clown car, no excruciating pseudo-realist interludes in which we have to sit there and contemplate the dark enormity of Batman’s feeeeeeelings — but he can balance an adult awareness of how silly comics are with real, emotionally resonant character work.

Age of Ultron is quite possibly the worst movie of Whedon’s career, and I can’t get over it. I’ve been obsessed with this movie for a week now, poking through it in my mind, trying to figure out what went wrong. I mean, it’s just plain hacky, in ways I frankly have trouble comprehending: It’s riddled with cliches, shortcuts, set-ups without pay-offs, elements that seem, not like bad choices, but like actual mistakes.

The worst thing about it, I think, is that it’s not even honestly bad. Bad can be entertaining: Thor, for instance, is a very bad movie, yet Thor’s badness gave me the gift of laughter, thanks to a little wonder known as “Odinsleeping.” (“Wait. The guy’s Dad just keeled over and went into a coma. Now they’re saying he does this often?” “He goes into a coma so often that comas are named after him.”) Age of Ultron is just pervasively mediocre, not even interesting enough to be awful.

The reason for this, I would submit, is that Marvel has a palpable — and growing — contempt for its audience. Lots of people have been parsing Marvel’s politics in recent weeks, but I’d submit this is beside the point in some ways: Marvel has been racist and Marvel has been sexist, but Marvel’s most profound failing is that it just plain doesn’t care about people. Age of Ultron is the clearest demonstration yet of the problem. And you should care about this problem. Because it’s getting worse, and because you can’t get away.