Avengers: Endgame still works remarkably well as the conclusion to the Infinity Saga, though maybe it worked too well.

With the Encore edition now retroactively adding setup for Doomsday, Adam examines how Endgame functioned as an audience off-ramp, why the MCU struggled to establish a new central narrative afterward and why several of the new scenes would have been far more effective if Marvel had planted them across the movies that followed.

A settlement has cleared another major hurdle for the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. combination, with conditions covering news operations, studio structure and annual theatrical output.

But how meaningful are those concessions?

Adam looks at the requirement to release thirty movies per year, the decision to maintain Paramount and Warner Bros. as separate operations and the difference between a merger remedy that sounds significant and one that actually changes corporate behavior.

Franchise secrecy has created an entire economy around knowing information before everyone else. But what happens when access to that information becomes leverage over the people being covered?

Adam looks at the controversy surrounding Jeff Sneider’s public threat to publish damaging rumors about an actress if her team would not cooperate with him, and uses it to examine the larger ethical problems surrounding scoop culture, access journalism and the artificial scarcity of information around major franchises.

The issue isn’t whether insiders sometimes get things right. It’s what journalists are willing to do with the power that access gives them.