With Infinity War having just come out, myself and a few colleagues have expressed varying degrees of premature fatigue over just looking at the trailer. I’ve fallen behind a bit with my MCU watching, having missed Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man Homecoming, and several others. Trying to catch up with all these missed films just seems like tedious geeky homework at this point. Thinking beyond Marvel and into other properties like Star Wars just makes me dizzy.

I’ve been feeling the fatigue for a couple years now. I began to really feel it when Civil War came out. Captain America: Winter Soldier thrilled me and surprised me, and I was hoping Civil War would achieve that same level of thought, intrigue and suspense. It disappointed me. The warring philosophies at the center of the conflict were half-assedly expressed, used only as crutch for the filmmakers to smash their action figures together in an attempt to settle their schoolyard arguments over who would win a fight. Witnessing the ensuing rapture of fans over Civil War made me feel as if I was out of step with “geek culture”. Knowing how many more of these movies were/are on the horizon and looking back on how many I’ve already missed out on seeing compounded the matter.

It perhaps should be said that I am not the world’s biggest superhero fan. I mean, I enjoy superheroes and their movies, but it’s far from being my primary passion. The same can also be said for the Star Wars films, and really a lot of other things to be found the “geek” sphere. I do enjoy these things. The original ‘77 Star Wars is one of my very favorite films, and I enjoy visiting it and its sequels occasionally. Captain Marvel (of the “Shazam” variety) is one of my favorite hero characters, and I enjoy reading those old Fawcett comics from time to time (and if that isn’t geeky, I don’t know what is). But the constant deluge of content in things that I am (comparatively) a mild fan of is wearying.

I want to enjoy these things. I like seeing Star Wars every now and then. Superhero movies are fun. But when these films come out at such a frequency, and they’re all interconnected to boot (and full enjoyment of them depends on having seen all of them), my enthusiasm for spending what little of my free time remains on these movies wanes. I usually work a 50-hour work week, and I’m a husband and father. If my options are checking out a new Commodore 64 game or catching up on the X-men films, I’m going the Commodore 64 route.

I suppose that the aspect I find myself befuddled by is the fact that “geek culture”, something that was originally more of a sub-culture, has become vastly more mainstream over the years, and thus, something corporations have been much more aggressive to monetize. I realize that this late in the game it isn’t that big of a revelation anymore, but it speaks to my exhaustion regarding this never-ending rush of content. Allow me to use another property to illustrate this glut. One of my favorite film series is Godzilla. There’s a TON of Godzilla films, 33 in all, having been released in a 60-plus year span from 1954 to today. There will be 20 films released of JUST the Marvel Cinematic Universe films by the end of this year, having all come out within a ten year span. When you’re cranking ‘em out at that pace, you’d think it wouldn’t be long before market saturation takes it toll. It certainly has on me.

Nate Lockhart is the host of the Memory Machine podcast on the Geekiverse Media Network. He likes pretty much everything that’s old and weird.

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