“Morbius, Goncharov, and Barbenheimer, as I see it, all play on the same comedic tension that you see with the baby-girlification of (usually male) characters from shows like Breaking Bad or Succession. The joke is about deflating The Serious Man archetype and, also, about deflating — or at least challenging — how prestige is defined by Hollywood. That’s the joke. A movie about a doll is being released on the same day as a big biopic about the man who developed the nuclear bomb and it’s directed by the film-broiest-film-bro director of the current era. Isn’t that funny? Oh, they’re both actually equally good movies? That’s even funnier. But brands still don’t understand that memes are large-scale inside jokes and are, more often than not, making fun of them. Hell, I’m willing go even further and say that all memes exist, at a base level, in direct opposition to marketing and, yet, brands still think they can safely co-opt this stuff and convert it into money. When in reality it’s much more like trying to safely ride a bucking bronco. I don’t think the Japanese reaction to Barbenheimer, which I should add is pretty reasonable, ultrantionalists aside, will break through to the average internet user and “kill the meme” or whatever — partly because nothing can “break through” anymore because America no longer has a coherent mass media apparatus. But I do think Barbenheimer is a great example of how little control these aging industries still have. Warner Bros. was given the easiest layup of a random viral lightning-in-a-bottle moment you could ask for and still managed to turn it into an international incident.”