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      ‘What About Us?’ Strikes Leave Other Hollywood Workers Reeling.

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      The lives of hundreds of thousands of crew members have been upended, and even a deal between the actors and the studios might not help much in the short term.Katie Reis has been a Hollywood lighting technician for 27 years, rigging equipment for movies like “Independence Day” and TV shows like “Quantum Leap.” But she hasn’t had a paycheck since May, when the first of two strikes — screenwriters, then actors — forced cameras to stop rolling.Ms. Reis, 60, has since been turned down for jobs at Target and Whole Foods. She is now looking into seasonal work at the mall.Her son Alex, a high school senior, recently had to go without new shoes for the start of classes. “If I go into Alex’s college fund, I have probably four, five months left,” she said. “But then I have nothing.”The recently settled screenwriters’ strike and the continuing actors’ strike have upended the lives of hundreds of thousands of crew members — the entertainment industry’s equivalent of blue-collar workers — and many are growing desperate for work. Caught in the crossfire for more than five months, they have drawn down savings accounts that in some cases were already diminished because of the pandemic. Some have been unable to afford groceries. A few have lost their homes.The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, for example, which represents 170,000 crew members in North America, estimated that its West Coast members alone lost $1.4 billion in wages between May and Sept. 16, the most recent date for which data was available. The extreme loss of hours worked, in turn, hurts funding for pension and health care plans.Even if entertainment companies and the actors’ union come to an agreement soon — which became less likely after the collapse of negotiations this week — production is not expected to return to normal until January at the earliest, in part because of the time it takes to reassemble creative teams, a process complicated by the coming holidays. Preproduction (before anyone gathers on a set) for new shows can take up to 12 weeks, with movies taking roughly 16 weeks.“I’m trying to manage my panic because it’s not going to be over when the strikes are over,” said Dallin James, a hairstylist who counts on red carpet premieres and other studio-related work for about 75 percent of his income.Dallin James, a hairstylist, said workers like him were “collateral damage” in the Hollywood strikes.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, reached a tentative agreement with studios on Sept. 24 and soon called off its 148-day strike. Writers have celebrated their new contract as the equivalent of winning a Super Bowl, describing the pay raises and improved working conditions they secured as “exceptional.” The Writers Guild said on Monday that its members had ratified the contract with 99 percent voting in favor.The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, appeared to be closing in on a deal of its own after being on strike since July 14, clearing the way for Hollywood’s assembly lines to grind back into motion. But talks between the guild and the studios broke down after a session on Wednesday, creating more uncertainty. The actors have asked for wage increases, including an 11 percent raise in the first year of a new contract; a revenue-sharing agreement for streaming shows and films; and guarantees that studios will not use artificial intelligence tools to create digital replicas of their likenesses without payment or approval.Cue whipsawing emotions for entertainment workers who didn’t have a say in the strikes and who won’t be receiving a pay increase when they return to work.“I understand why they had to go on strike,” Mr. James said. “On the other hand, what about us? We haven’t really been considered in all of this. It feels like we’re collateral damage.”The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains with unions on behalf of the major entertainment companies, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.More than two million Americans work in jobs directly or indirectly related to making TV shows and films, according to the Motion Picture Association, a trade organization. They include writers, actors and other “above the line” creative personnel, along with studio executives. But a vast majority contribute in more humble ways. They are set dressers, camera operators, carpenters, location scouts, painters, costume designers, visual effects artists, stunt doubles, janitors, payroll clerks, assistants and chauffeurs.A big-budget superhero movie can easily employ 3,000 people, with the cast numbering fewer than 100, including credited extras.Gabriel Sanders, a longtime boom mic operator in Georgia, has started teaching fitness and yoga classes.Audra Melton for The New York Times“It’s desperate — our crews are really suffering,” said the actress Annette Bening, who is the chair of the Entertainment Community Fund, a nonprofit that provides emergency financial assistance and other services to workers in the industry. “These are people who are hardworking, who have a lot of pride. They are not used to being in a position of having to ask for help. But that’s where we are now.”With her husband, Warren Beatty, Ms. Bening has been among the celebrity donors to the fund, which has distributed more than $8.5 million to roughly 4,000 film and television workers since screenwriters went on strike. (That breaks down to $560,000 a week, compared with about $75,000 a week before the strikes.) The organization also hosts online workshops to help Hollywood workers navigate eviction notices, among other topics.“This is going to have a long tail,” Ms. Bening said. “We still expect a significant increase of inquiries in the coming months, even once work resumes.” (Ms. Bening, a four-time Oscar nominee who stars in the coming Netflix film “Nyad,” about the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, has walked picket lines with other actors in recent months. She said the actors’ strike was “imperative” given the deterioration of working conditions and compensation levels in the streaming era.)Other Hollywood nonprofits have also been distributing money and holding food drives, including the Motion Picture & Television Fund and the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, a charity that provides financial assistance to workaday performers. The foundation, which is associated with the actors’ union but is run independently, has been processing more than 30 times its usual number of applications for emergency aid, or more than 400 a week.Starting on Sept. 1, Los Angeles-area workers enrolled in the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan were allowed to withdraw up to $20,000 each for financial hardship. By Sept. 8, workers had pulled roughly $45 million, according to a document compiled by plan administrators that was viewed by The New York Times. A spokesman for the plan said no updated information was available.Robin Urdang, a music supervisor in Los Angeles whose credits include “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and the film “Call Me by Your Name,” has no pension plan to fall back on. To pay for living expenses, Ms. Urdang has been dipping into money she had been saving for a down payment on a house.“It’s depressing,” she said, adding that she typically works on four to seven projects at once. Ms. Urdang is still working a bit, including on a series for Amazon that was past the filming phase of production when actors went on strike. But she spends much of her day crocheting sweaters and reading books.Even so, Ms. Urdang said she sympathized with the writers and actors. Streaming has also changed her fortunes considerably. She used to do a lot of work on broadcast television, where an episode would go from script to on air in two weeks. (Most music supervisors, who select and license songs, are paid half their fee at the start of production and the other half when episodes are completed.) Now she does the same amount of work, but the payment schedule on an eight-episode streaming show is spread out over a year.“So I understand where they’re coming from,” she said.The studio shutdown has been felt most severely in California and New York. The strikes have cost the California economy more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. But the strikes have also darkened soundstages across the country, as well as in Canada and England. Georgia, for instance, has three million square feet of soundstage space.Gabriel Sanders, who lives in Decatur, Ga., with his wife and two daughters, is a longtime boom mic operator who has worked on films like “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and series like “Law & Order: Organized Crime.” As the strikes have dragged on, Mr. Sanders has turned to teaching fitness and yoga classes.“It’s good for my soul, but it doesn’t pay very well,” he said.His wife, Carey Yaruss Sanders, a voice instructor, has started a pet-sitting and dog-walking business to help make ends meet.Mr. Sanders said there had been “a lot of internal fighting” in the crew community about the strikes, with some people, like him, cheering on the actors and writers and others saying, “Enough already, we just need to get back to work.”“I have no resentment — do what you have to do to protect your rights,” Mr. Sanders said, referring to the strikes. “But that doesn’t mean it has been easy.” More

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      Talks Between Striking Actors and Studios Are Suspended

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      The sides said they remained far apart on the most significant issues, dealing a blow to hopes that the entertainment industry could soon fully roar back to life.Negotiations between the major entertainment studios and the union representing tens of thousands of actors have collapsed, with both sides saying on Thursday morning that they remained far apart on the most significant issues.The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, said that it was suspending talks because they were “no longer moving us in a productive direction” after a session on Wednesday. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, which has been on strike since July, accused studio executives of “bully tactics,” and said the studios recently presented an offer “that was, shockingly, worth less than they proposed before the strike began.”The collapse of the negotiations is a significant setback for the entertainment industry, which has essentially been at a standstill for months because of dual strikes by actors and screenwriters. On Monday, more than 8,000 screenwriters ratified a new three-year contract with the studio alliance, formally ending their monthslong labor dispute. There was optimism that a deal with the actors would follow and that Hollywood could soon fully roar back to life.But with actors continuing to strike, most television and movie production remains suspended. The financial fallout has been significant. The California economy has lost an estimated $5 billion. Tens of thousands of behind-the-scenes workers have been out of work for months. Share prices for many major media companies have dropped, and now there is a further threat to next year’s box office results.Like their counterparts in the screenwriters guild, leaders of the actors’ union have called this moment “existential.” They are seeking wage increases, as well as protections around the use of artificial intelligence. Actors have now been on strike for 91 days; screenwriters recently returned to work after a 148-day walkout. The last time both unions had been on strike at the same time was 1960.When negotiations between the actors’ union and the studios resumed last week — just days after the studios and screenwriters had reached a tentative agreement — it represented the first time that the sides had met since the actors went on strike on July 14. There were five bargaining sessions, and many industry observers believed that the talks would soon lead to a deal.In a statement released early Thursday morning, the studio alliance said it had offered wage increases, met “nearly all of the union’s demands on casting” and proposed further protections around the use of A.I. The alliance also said it offered “the same terms that were ratified” by both the writers’ and directors’ unions regarding wage increases and streaming royalties.The alliance also said, however, that the actors’ union wanted a viewership bonus that “would cost more than $800 million per year, which would create an untenable economic burden.”Union leaders accused studio executives of walking away from the bargaining table “after refusing to counter our latest offer.”“These companies refuse to protect performers from being replaced by artificial intelligence, they refuse to increase your wages to keep up with inflation, and they refuse to share a tiny portion of the immense revenue YOUR work generates for them,” union officials said in a statement addressed to members. “Our resolve is unwavering,” the statement continued. “Join us on picket lines and at solidarity events around the country and let your voices be heard.” More

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      ‘The Road Dance’ Review: A World War I Weepie

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      Based on a Scottish best seller, the movie is a standard period drama that arrives at hard truths with a hammy delivery.Set in the Outer Hebrides, a verdant archipelago to the west of mainland Scotland, “The Road Dance” is a standard period drama that arrives at hard truths with a hammy delivery.Kirsty (Hermione Corfield) is a restless beauty living with her sister and mother in a remote crofting (small tenant farming) community. It’s the years around World War I, and forced conscriptions are sweeping the nation — including Kirsty’s beau, a poetry-reading softy named Murdo (Will Fletcher).Before Murdo and three other local men are shipped off to the Western Front, the village honors them with a night of dance and drink. It’s here that Kirsty will be violently raped, an assault which the director, Richie Adams, depicts blurrily, unfolding in darkness.Adapted from the 2002 Scottish best seller by John MacKay, this run-of-the-mill weepie spends the bulk of its time detailing the aftermath of the attack. Kirsty becomes pregnant, and she’s forced to conceal not just her physical state but her mental trauma from the snooping members of her ultrareligious town. Cryptic sermon scenes about sinners and Satan play throughout Kirsty’s ordeal, raising the stakes — though Kirsty’s not the only one who has gone through hell and back in these parts, as evidenced by a whisper network of wizened women who band together to pull her through.The culprit remains unknown until the bitter end, a revelation served with a bland sort of twist — that any man is capable of such violence. It’s an uninspired take, along with the use of rape as a plot device.Shifting between stagy sincerity and startling realism (the labor scene is particularly colorful), “The Road Dance” is a vividly rendered, if ultimately schematic portrait of feminine resilience.The Road DanceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Divinity’ Review: Missed Conception

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      An immortality drug causes social disruption in this ludicrously dystopian sci-fi experiment.In an old-as-time dichotomy, the women in Eddie Alcazar’s “Divinity” fall into roughly two categories: pliable prostitutes or those who have been deemed “pure.” The first group wears slinky, sparkly onesies; the second sports unadorned, flesh-toned bodysuits that render them as uniform as the spermatozoa in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask)” (1972). For a movie concerned primarily with reproduction, the connection seems apt.A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism. The title refers to a drug that promises to bestow immortality, with the unfortunate wrinkle that users — apparently most of humanity — are rendered sterile. Men are transformed into obscenely pumped poseurs, pleasured by gorgeous women with zero body fat and extremely limited fashion choices. In the background, members of the creepy purity posse — women who have never taken the drug — plot to put their unsullied uteruses to work repopulating the planet.Shot mainly in stark black and white using specially made film stock, this oppressive, inarticulate dystopia unfolds mostly in a remote desert compound belonging to Jaxxon Pierce (Stephen Dorff). Continuing the work of his dead father (Scott Bakula, seen in gritty video diaries), who invented the drug, Jaxxon tinkers with the formula, unaware that two alien brothers (Moises Arias and Jason Genao) have descended from the stars to teach him a lesson by getting him high on his own supply.This all plays as completely bonkers, albeit presented with punishing solemnity. A style experiment assembled mainly using storyboards in place of a script, the movie combines live action and stop-motion animation, old-school prosthetics and retro accessories. The occasionally arresting visuals, though, are repeatedly undercut by dumb dialogue and often atrocious acting, the whole experienced through a wall of throbbing, squawking sound. This is not the movie to see if you are nursing a hangover.Exploring some of the same ground he covered in his previous feature, “Perfect” (2019), Alcazar has made what feels like a very grouchy film, one that rails against our craving for youth and beauty and chides those who choose pleasure over procreation. There is something undeniably sad, though, in both its naïveté and its reliance on repurposed tropes, like the winking television ads that recall Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers” (1997). And I have to ask: If everyone here is supposedly focused exclusively on pleasure, why can’t we feel some? Instead, “Divinity” is deeply depressing, the announcement “Steven Soderbergh Presents” above the title (he’s the executive producer) perhaps not the antidote to the funk that its maker might have hoped.A more daring movie might have explored the notion that limited reproduction could offer some benefit to our struggling planet. But “Divinity” (at least for those who are inclined to hang around long enough to learn the drug’s ingredients) appears to favor a more retrograde anti-science message. You won’t have to squint too hard, though, to spot the irony in a narrative that cheerleads for fertility, yet is itself too barren to entertain.DivinityNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jamie Foxx in a Lively Courtroom Drama

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      Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones deliver bravura performances in this Maggie Betts film about a funeral-home proprietor in financial trouble.In the opening scenes of this fact-based courtroom drama, which is front-loaded with a sentimentality it ultimately doesn’t need, “The Burial” might elicit some skepticism from viewers. That is, it may be a bit of a stretch to root for a Mississippi funeral-home proprietor with eight locations who’s unable to square some poor business decisions.That funeral-home squire is Jeremiah O’Keefe, played by Tommy Lee Jones, and we meet him at his 75th birthday party in 1995. He had tried to sell a few of his facilities to the slick C.E.O. of a death-care mega-corporation, but when the corporation withholds paperwork, O’Keefe could potentially be squeezed into bankruptcy.This situation gets a lot more interesting. A young Black lawyer working with O’Keefe enlists another Black lawyer, the very rich and flashy Willie Gary, played by Jamie Foxx, to work on the case. The logic is that the O’Keefe’s lawsuit will play to a mostly Black jury. The American way of death, apparently, did not gain more integrity as it became corporatized, and the exploitations of Big Funeral, it turns out, have an ugly racist angle.Directed by Maggie Betts from a script she wrote with Doug Wright, “The Burial” develops into a lively courtroom drama with wide-ranging pertinence. Of course its two lead actors give the bravura performances you’d expect from them, but they don’t eat the scenery — they take the material seriously and invest in it with welcome nuance. The supporting cast is also first rate, with Jurnee Smollett percolating with intelligence as Gary’s female counterpart for the defense, and Bill Camp as the villain, doing an underhanded, clever variant on Jack Nicholson’s performance in “A Few Good Men.”The BurialRated R for language. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Review: Tumbling From the Alps to the Courtroom

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      Did a writer kill her husband? In this cerebral murder trial drama by the director Justine Triet, the audience never has its footing and questions go unanswered.“Anatomy of a Fall,” a cerebral trial drama by the director Justine Triet, opens with a mysterious death in the French Alps. The deceased is an aspiring writer named Samuel (Samuel Theis). The suspect is his more successful wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a novelist who is a lot like her surroundings: stoic, remote and a tad frosty.Did Sandra kill her husband? As the film flows from investigation to tribunal to verdict, it’s only interested in the question — not the answer. Triet and her fellow screenwriter (and real-life partner) Arthur Harari invite a jury to dissect the flaws of a rather average woman. Sandra drinks, but she’s not a drunk. She’s aloof, but not cruel. She needs sex, but she’s hardly the aggressor the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) describes.Her most confounding trait is, if you believe her testimony, an ability to nap while Samuel spends his last living hour replaying a cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” at a volume so earsplitting the steel drums could have triggered an avalanche. The closest anyone comes to a motive is when Sandra’s inquisitors suggest that she was annoyed by the song’s misogynist lyrics. Her lawyer (Saadia Bentaïeb) counters: “It was an instrumental version.”All people are unknowable, the film insists, even to themselves. If any of us were forced to defend our incongruities and fibs — the fights we avoid, the compromises that make us quietly seethe — we’d all be convicted of irreconcilable contradictions. (Still a lesser crime than murder.) Sandra just has to confess her inner frictions to a courtroom where her rationalizations hang in the air as goofily as circus balloons.The film doesn’t need to spend two and a half hours intoning that life is an anthology of competing narratives, that every marriage is made of two storytellers. But at least it finds a few ways to drum on the idea, most resonantly through Sandra and Samuel’s books, which draw their inspiration from a blend of biography and fiction (as did the lead in Triet’s last film, “Sibyl,” another author disastrously mining reality). That blur, notes a student (Camille Rutherford) who interviews Sandra for her thesis in the first scene, “makes us want to figure out which is which.” Sandra smiles at the challenge. Later, however, her freedom will hinge on how a jury parses her truth from others’ interpretations.As experts take the stand to insist that their version of events is correct, the cinematographer, Simon Beaufils, switches from a composed style to one that zips and zooms, like an on-the-fly documentarian. Watching a witness parry questions from both the prosecution and defense, the image holds on him while the camera sprints back and forth to keep pace with the arguments lobbing from each side. The whiplash is dizzying.The most important judge in the room is the couple’s preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Partly blind because of an accident that figures into the case, Daniel is uncomfortable becoming a character in the lawyers’ competing narratives. His poor vision is a metaphor for the struggle to see the truth. A more poetic allusion is how the boy teaches himself piano — not by reading sheet music, but by discovering through trial and error which notes sound right. As a bonus, we hear the passage of time in his improvement.Triet’s filmmaking style is deliberate, an unusual approach for a story about ambiguity. She wants the viewer to decide Sandra’s guilt — she even has a minor character say so outright — and so she withholds both the answer and the pleasure of feeling like we can figure out. Even Hüller, the kind of earthy and sincere actor who builds her characters out from the spine, has admitted that she isn’t sure if Sandra did it.In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration — or appreciating the humor of this year’s Cannes jury definitively awarding her film the Palme d’Or. I’ve gone back to study some scenes and believe Triet knows what happened on the mountain. But she’s also added feints and discrepancies that go unacknowledged, vexations that exist solely for the audience. These are secrets Triet shares only with us and the dead man. And I suspect she’s taking them to the grave.Anatomy of a FallRated R for language and violent images. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘In My Mother’s Skin’ Review: A Grim Fairy Tale

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      Kenneth Dagatan’s new folk horror film acts as a cautionary tale about putting one’s fate into the hands of the enemy.Kenneth Dagatan’s “In My Mother’s Skin” is a cursed fairy tale in the same vein as Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 masterpiece, “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Set in the Philippines during World War II, Dagatan’s film follows Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli), the young daughter of a wealthy Filipino family who is stranded in a mansion with her mother, brother and housekeeper (Angeli Bayani) while her father goes off to fight in the conflict. When her mother (Beauty Gonzalez) comes down with a mysterious ailment, Tala puts blind trust in a captivating forest fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) who promises to cure her. What could possibly go wrong?Dagatan weaves impressive, bloodcurdling set pieces from a modest budget. Besides the fairy herself, decked out in a gilded costume that Björk might wear onstage, there’s a visual feast of banquets, jungle ruins and hidden treasures that Tala discovers in her explorations. All of this lies in stark contrast to the gory violence that ensues as the fairies gradually lay waste to the family, using Tala’s mother as a host for their flesh-eating tendencies. It’s refreshing to see a horror movie this artful that doesn’t shy away from B-movie spectacle.In keeping with its historical themes, “In My Mother’s Skin” acts as a cautionary tale about putting one’s fate into the hands of the enemy, and the results are predictably grim. Like this year’s sleeper horror hit “Skinamarink,” this film’s unwavering depiction of children suffering will no doubt come across as excessive to some, but it’s what makes “In My Mother’s Skin” so beguiling and terrifying. True to classic folklore, this is a story that delivers fantasy and queasiness in equal measure.In My Mother’s SkinNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      Book Review: ‘MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,’ by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards

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      “The Reign of Marvel Studios” captures how movies based on comic-book properties came to dominate pop culture. At least until now.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin EdwardsHollywood doesn’t believe in immortals. From Mary Pickford to the MGM musical, Golden Age cowboys to teenage wizards, the city worships its gods only until their box-office power dims. So it feels audacious — if not foolhardy — to open “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” and find its authors, Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards, declaring that it’s difficult to imagine a future where the Disney-owned superhero industrial complex “didn’t run forever.” Even Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, has yet to engineer a perpetual motion machine.Yet the three veteran pop culture journalists behind this detailed accounting of the company’s ascendancy have the numbers to support it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a constellation of solo superhero tales mixed with all-star team-ups, including four installments of “The Avengers,” is Hollywood’s most successful movie franchise of all time — 32 films that have grossed a combined $29.5 billion. By comparison, the book points out that the “Star Wars” series, Marvel’s nearest rival, has notched only 12 films and $10.3 billion.Turning the pages — which are devoid of the usual, and unnecessary, glossy photo spreads — one realizes that superheroes are an X-ray lens into the last decade and a half of Hollywood disruption. Every upheaval gets a mention: corporate mergers; profit-losing streaming services; Chinese censorship; digitally scanned actors; social media cancellations; #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite; the resurgence of a production-to-distribution vertical pipeline that hadn’t been legal since the 1948 Paramount Decree. Pity there’s no room to examine each in depth.First, the origin story. In the ’90s, the former overseer of Marvel Enterprises, Ike Perlmutter (let’s give him the comic book nickname “The Pennypincher”), empowered his entertainment division to license its biggest stars for cheap, scattering Spider-Man, Hulk and the X-Men across other studios in service of selling more toys. (“MCU” familiarizes us with the marketing term “toyetic.”)The saga of who and what changed the company’s direction involves chancy gambles, pivotal lunches at Mar-a-Lago, rivalrous committees and the waning of Perlmutter’s influence, amid the waxing of Kevin Feige, the book’s hero, a five-time U.S.C. Film School reject who started his production career teaching Meg Ryan to log in to AOL for the romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.” To establish their independence, the writers mention at the top that Disney, now Marvel’s parent company, asked people not to give them an interview. Many already had, or chose to anyway, although most shy away from on-the-record quotes about the really salacious stuff. No one will say that the rumored $400-million-plus Robert Downey Jr. earned across nine films factored into the decision to kill off Tony Stark, but the innuendo is thicker than Iron Man’s armored exoskeleton.Signs that the Marvel era is nearing the end of its cultural dominance are everywhere, including in this book. Despite the authors’ rah-rah intro (there are no bad Marvel films, they claim, only “a mix of entertaining diversions and inarguable masterpieces”), they wisely sense that the library’s cinema history section will eventually file Feige next to John Ford as filmmakers who defined the spirit of a moment.“MCU” concedes that three of Marvel’s worst-reviewed films were all made in the last three years, just as one of the studio’s cornerstone creatives, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn, decamped to run DC Studios, the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.Meanwhile, the churn of faster, cheaper superhero content for Disney+ has led the studio’s weary visual-effects workers (whose exhaustion is well documented here) to vote to unionize. Fandom has become a Sisyphean labor as never-ending spinoff series force a once-rapt audience to pick and choose which story lines they’ll bother to follow.To those seismic grumbles, I’ll add another: Today’s teenagers were toddlers when Marvel first seized the zeitgeist. What generation wants to dig the same stuff as their parents?Marvel’s inescapable obsolescence is the best argument for “MCU”; the genre should be studied with the same rigor as film noir. The book’s admiration for Marvel movies works in its favor, freeing the writers to skip straight to the gossip, like the relative who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving to whisper about your cousin’s divorce. If you didn’t understand the plot of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” before, they’re not wasting space explaining it here.Instead, the book will satisfy your appetite for Marvel’s endless contract negotiations with Sony over the character rights for Spider-Man, which is easy when one encounter climaxes with the former Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal hurling a sandwich — and an expletive — at Feige. Battles over screenplay credits are even juicier. That’s where you’ll find the most inventive insults.Elsewhere, one has to read several paragraphs past a doctor willing to estimate that “50 to 75 percent” of Marvel’s stars are Hulked-out on performance-enhancing drugs to learn that he has not, in fact, treated any of the studio’s actors. While the hustle to wrap things up before the tome turns into “Captain America: Civil War and Peace” means racing through the most recent projects in a blur, earlier chapters are able to dish the dirt, like whose script notes triggered the collapse of Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” and why Feige refused to continue collaborating with the original Bruce Banner, Edward Norton.After all, the authors know a saga is only as exciting as its villain.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios | By Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards | 528 pp. | Liveright | $35 More