Paul Bettany stars in a WandaVision spinoff that’s a visually striking, genre-bending package – of fighting and tediously wordy dialogue. What an odd confection

Martin Scorsese compared them to theme parks. Nicolas Cage likened them to WWE. The products of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – 38 films, 18 television shows and counting – are not generally well regarded as works of art. This is understandable: they are derivative, corporate and also somewhat mechanical – not just in their CGI-heavy production or phased rollouts, but in their preoccupations, with robotics, technological combat, complex webs of association. This is not the cinema, per Scorsese, “of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

The MCU doesn’t just gravitate towards cliche in this area, it barely features actual humans at all. And yet – like a superhero searching for a special stone – you get the sense that Marvel will not rest until such profundity is within its grasp. Unlike rollercoasters or wrestling, the MCU can be quite intellectually demanding: why shouldn’t it be capable of illuminating truths about the human condition as well?

Warning: contains spoilers
The four short scenes added to the new version has made the film the highest-grossing of all time – but the only people really enjoying this are the Disney accountants

Does it really matter which film is the highest-grossing of all time at the global box office? Will James Cameron be lying awake at night staring into the darkness and pondering whether to withdraw humanity’s access to giant, blue-skinned space elves out of sheer spite, just because Avatar has been dethroned once again by Avengers: Endgame? It seems unlikely. Are the Russo brothers at this very moment leaping and capering with wild abandon because adding a few new scenes and releasing their film for the umpteenth time has led to this momentous changing of the guard? Probably not. Is a Disney accountant somewhere holding a tiny awards ceremony in which every nominee is himself? Well yes, absolutely, because the mouse house ultimately owns both films.

And yet the most interesting thing about Avengers: Endgame’s return to cinemas is not how much money it has made – for the record, the rerelease, titled Avengers Endgame: Encore, had brought in another $126m worldwide by last weekend, taking its lifetime total to approximately $2.925bn (just ahead of Avatar’s $2.923bn) – but what Marvel added to the picture while we were all busy counting.