Soap opera for “men”.
Also, I say it with affection. I love my soup operas. Our culture has come to have negative connotations to the term "soap opera" and also to the term "wrestling", because of the association with lowest common denominator storytelling, but it is harder than it looks and mass appeal isn't something to scoff at.
counterpoint : cinema designed to key in on adult nostalgia for the sake of safe and easy to acquire financial backing has ruined any quality output that Hollywood once had, and destroyed entirely the indie scene and the chance of acquiring money for any project that is outside the scope of the 600 Superman or Batman movies.
It is easier to make something decent with billions of dollars shoveled at you than it is to do so on a shoe-string budget, and if the environment has proven itself to be either mass-market appeal or decent quality cinema -- which has so far been shown to be the case -- then yeah, mass market appeal is a criteria worth criticism.
if "to scoff at" you mean "You must be impressed with the financial money making power of super hero movies." Then yeah, absolutely , I wish I could make that kind of money -- Super hero movies, however, have yet to impress me as cinema.
This happened before, by the way.
Hollywood kept shoveling money into super hero dreck until Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction made financiers realize that weirder indie shit could also make a buck, so we got things like boogie nights and grifters and the big lebowski getting funded after a long run of yearly Tim Burton hero movies.
As much as it pains me to say it, I hope some new neo tarentino pops up and makes a billion with something weird so we can get out of this lock-step
What Hollywood "lost" in recent decades wasn't indie/small budget/experimental/weird cinema, but "the middle budget", the romcoms and "family movies" and expensive ensemble comedy movies and oscar-bait dramas with lots of bankable stars doing silly or dramatic things on less than a blockbuster budget but more than an indie. But the indie world is filling in a lot of those gaps, and the direct to streaming "original" world is filling in more of those, and signs are some of those budgets are coming back (Heart of the Beast is an example of that sort of lost mid-budget film that just released to theaters).
You may not like superhero budgets, but they are not what killed "weirder indie shit". If anything they seem to be supporting it. Superheroes killed the mid-budget because they could play many of the mid-budget genres such as "family movie", comedy, and romance, and sometimes even "serious" drama.
(ETA: The Big Lebowski is a fun example because that was an indie budget film and the closest the Coens came to the mid-budget was The Hudsucker Proxy which needed it for all the period piece work. Budget size doesn't necessarily equal quality, though I remain a fan of The Hudsucker Proxy it did poorly in the box office and is often considered one of the worst films from the Coens. Ethan Coen directed Honey Don't and Drive-Away Dolls in recent years which were both excellent. The Coens haven't disappeared, though they've shifted gears a bit.)