It seems that we’re witnessing the first serious cracks in the previously unstoppable MCU, where people are no longer so loyal to the franchise that they’ll show up for movies that plainly don’t look any good. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is the most aggressively the public has rejected a Marvel movie, perhaps because it’s not funny like the other Ant-Mans and is instead the worst-looking sci-fi goop you’ve ever seen. Perhaps this and some other recent superhero flops actually indicate that their stranglehold on theaters is over, and we can finally get back to making real movies, like Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets or even just the Robert Aldrich-Burt Reynolds movies Kino is putting out. But I’m not so foolish that I believe there’s any chance we get something remotely like Jane Campion’s In the Cut (out this week in its uncensored director’s cut, on an adequate Mill Creek Blu-Ray) in American theaters again, it was already a shooting star in 2003 and now its art-damaged, horrifying look at sexual power imbalances is the exact movie people should be making now (it’s no wonder the film world welcomed Campion back with open arms, they get it now) but nobody has either the courage or the talent to even try to approximate it. But someone should try, preferably once Mark Ruffalo gets fully freed from his Marvel jail.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania 4K (Disney)
Endangered Species (Shout Factory)
Hustle (Kino)
In the Cut (Mill Creek)
The Italian Job 4K (Paramount)
The Longest Yard 4K (Kino)
Max Fleischer’s Superman (Warner)
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre 4K (Lionsgate)
Targets (Criterion)