Sterling Point vs. Marvel: Youth Wins
Meanwhile, Destin Daniel Cretton has become the most interesting problem in Marvel's calendar.
Sterling Point vs. Marvel: Youth Wins
There is a version of summer television that knows exactly what it is — unhurried, specific, quietly confident — and then there is everything Marvel is currently trying to manage without dropping it. Both showed up in the same news cycle, which is either a coincidence or a provocation.
Megan Park's *Sterling Point* is the one worth your time. The writer-director behind *My Old Ass* has moved to series television without losing the thing that made her film work: the refusal to let young women be symbols instead of people. The setup is the kind of premise that should be corny — a seventeen-year-old New Yorker inherits an island in Canada and discovers a secret sister waiting there — but Park earns it. She's made a show that feels like the specific warmth of a summer you didn't expect to remember. Netflix isn't carrying it, which means it'll be criminally underseen, which means you should go find it immediately before it becomes the thing people wish they'd watched when it was fresh.
Meanwhile, Destin Daniel Cretton has become the most interesting problem in Marvel's calendar. *Spider-Man: Brand New Day* crossed a billion at a speed only *Top Gun: Maverick* has beaten, and now the question everyone is asking — including, apparently, Cretton — is where *Shang-Chi 2* has been hiding. His own answer is the most revealing thing Marvel has accidentally let a director say in years: without the slate cuts, he muses, there might have been two sequels already. Read that carefully. That's not gratitude. That's a man doing the arithmetic out loud and not entirely liking the sum. The same writers who delivered *Brand New Day* are now working on *Avengers: Doomsday* and *Avengers: Secret Wars*, which is either the studio consolidating its best instincts or concentrating all its risk into one corner of the board. Possibly both.
And then Eli Roth announced, without particular embarrassment, that he used generative AI on *Ice Cream Man*. The discourse predictably followed. What's worth noting is not the AI — it's the lack of apology. Roth has never pretended to be interested in anything other than the mechanics of discomfort, and his honesty here is more useful than the hand-wringing it generated. Whether the film justifies the method is a different question. The answer will probably be no, but it will be a specific, committed kind of no.
Vicky McClure returns in *Trigger Point* Season 4 and remains the most underrated presence in British television — which is exactly what she'd say about herself, and exactly why she keeps being right.
*Sterling Point* is the move. Everything else is infrastructure.
