BELGRADE, THURSDAY

SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED a curious link between global warming and the staleness of modern culture.

Three recent studies have noted sharp increases in temperature at the same time as movie franchises and streaming services dump their latest reheated offerings to the world.

“So stale has western culture become that we believe it’s having an effect on the production of carbon dioxide among the human population,” says Dr Livingstone Flintstone. “There’s almost nothing original being offered by way of film, television or books. The latter appear to be dominated by a conveyor belt of detective plots, chick lit and banal prize offerings, all pretty much the same, all as unique as a McDonald’s hamburger. With so many of the film franchises you can show clips from different movies, out of sequence, and they all look as if they belong in the same film. Superhero plots have crushed cinema into a bland block of indistinguishable mush, as if produced by a computer, which indeed many are.

“And it appears all this blandness does have an effect on the climate. The researc is now clear and indisputable. Every new Mission Impossible offering sees a definite temperature increase. When a steaming service offers the Harry Potter franchise, ditto. Then there’s The Fast and the Furious, all ten thousand of them, and the endless Iron Man and Spiderman and Batman movies, and so on, and on. And don’t get me going on the damage the latest Top Gun movie has done all by itself. One of these days there will be just one enormous blockbuster franchise movie made every year, something so bloated and bland and repetitive that watching it will have to carry a health warning. And with it, the world will boil.”