Apple TV has produced some bangers, it’s just too bad nobody’s watching them because most people don’t have Apple TV.

I pirate crazy amounts of Apple TV content. Almost feel like I should cancel Netflix and make the switch, but there's just enough good new anime coming out to drag my heels.

I do plan on buying their Blu-Rays as my budget allows since they're releasing Blu-Rays for the shows I want to see the most. It's nice that they offer that alternative for people without subscriptions.

They can be, sure, but I doubt most of them are. And of course there's the comic book movie fan, and then there's the general moviegoing audience, which is a likely a lot larger.

And I don't see the progressive case against this movie along political lines. We're getting a black Captain America suiting up for the first time to fight an (ostensibly) evil white president, after all, plus the canonical removal of a Jewish agent's heritage. A likely plot point of this film will be the mistreatment of black people in decades past at the hands on the American military. If anything I'd expect angry neckbearded wokespotters to boycott this movie, but that audience is so small that their response to this movie will be inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

That's kind of what I'm saying. Any director working for them has to be OK with the studio taking their movie and fucking around with it, they don't get to kick up a fuss.

That automatically excludes a whole bunch of really talented directors who actually might make something worth watching if the studio wasn't so meddlesome.

Taiki Waititi? Sam Raimi? James Gunn?

They get more slack. But you can practically see the moment the Disney executive walks into the room, in Dr Strange 2, and starts making decisions over Raimi's head.

Waititi figured out how to go with the flow and still churn good stuff in Love and Thunder. But so much of what he did was a deliberate subversion of Disney tropes, it's like he hoodwinked the producers.

On the flip side, his series "Reservation Dogs" feels like something Disney would have put out thirty years ago, but has completely forgotten how to do anymore.

And because I'm in the mood to fight, I'm going to say Guardians (particularly 3) is highly overrated.

in Waititi's case probably too much

Oh, I absolutely do not begrudge anyone getting a paycheck, we all need to eat.

I don't think any of the directors you mentioned would push back against studio interference though. There are directors who will trade control for a paycheck and there are ones who won't. The ones who won't often make more interesting movies.