It’s been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie and, as it turns out, fans were eager to come back for more of Panem’s most brutal game show/mechanism of totalitarian control. The newest entry in the series, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, has put up an impressive box office performance so far, earning well over $100 million and going strong into its third week. But with so many other big IP movies bombing at the box office this year, it begs the question: Are other franchises releasing too many movies?

The most obvious offender here is Marvel, which had November box office news of its own: The Marvels, the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will become the first movie in the series not to break $100 million at the domestic box office. This is devastating news for Disney. 33 movies into its run, the MCU is the biggest movie franchise of all time, so eventually the company shifted into fire hose mode, putting out as much content as possible.

Since 2017, the studio has committed to pumping out three Marvel movies a year — the only exception to........

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