It used to be people had trouble letting actors move on from genre roles that made them famous in beloved series. Now we demand they stay in parts they hated even when the properties were total failures in the vague hope we can cybermob them back to life. What about when the performers themselves keep telling us they just don’t WANT TO? Because, seriously – people are being WEIRD about not letting Ben Affleck just… NOT be Batman anymore.

And so comes Marvel Studios’ “ETERNALS,” in which we discover the answer to one of the great pressing questions of our age: Can the (thus far) invincible winning combination of the most precision-engineered crowd-pleaser assembly line ever created (courtesy the late Mr. Disney), one the greatest caches of intellectual property of the late 20th Century (courtesy the later Misters Lee, Kirby, Simon, et al), a studio head (the very much alive Kevin Feige) capable of balancing the creative ambitions of emergent dynamic filmmaking talent with the demands of an evolving global mass-market audience and – yes – also just a ton of money to spend… but that’s also being dispensed from a machine that is both made of and expects to devour more of that same money still continue its unprecedented hat-trick victory streak: consistently winning with audiences, winning with critics and raking in fortunes at the box-office… even when the formula is applied to something like “The Eternals?”

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