The reading above is from May 2019, at the commercial peak of the form, and even then more Americans said too many were being made than said the number was about right. The phrase for what followed, superhero fatigue, came into general use in the 2020s, and the trigger was volume rather than quality: from 2021 the dominant studio extended its connected universe onto a streaming service, so keeping up stopped being a few cinema trips a year and became homework. The box office turned in 2023, when a run of releases underperformed badly enough to read as a pattern rather than as individual misses, and the studio publicly reconsidered how much it would make each year. The critical attack had arrived earlier and from inside the industry: in 2019 and after, well-known directors argued the films were closer to theme-park attractions than to cinema. What the polling captures is that the audience reached a version of that conclusion first, and the disagreement is mostly between people who want a format they can rely on and people who resent one.