I mean, as long as transformers 22 was opening to 357M, and transformers 27 was having amazing 15th weekends… yeah, that’s still pretty cool box office. I wouldn’t be *as* happy as with the MCU doing it, but still pretty amazing numbers. And still pretty interesting to track presales for, try to predict internal Multis, legs, look at industry evolution, etc etc.
I am a numbers guy, and at the end of the day if we had some presales data, or OD data, or few days daily data for [AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCT 37544B] which was a completely abstracted black box that I knew I would never learn any details about as a narrative work, I wouldn’t really care that much. That basically already is the case for most movies whose box office I think about, and I still enjoy it. If MCU dominance is a turn off, then I would argue what’s lost its luster is the era of surprise independent/original hits (which I know some people were very attached to) more than “the box office” per se.