The easy explanation for this is that adults, with the disposable income that they never had as children, are good consumers of products they couldn’t previously afford. Nostalgia sells.

You bemoan the consumption of video games and superhero fiction as low value content. And you don’t blame their formats, but their content. But is that right? Past generations were dominated by all sorts of cheap, disposable entertainment- soap operas, radio shows, pulp fiction. What do yearly superhero films resemble? The serial films that arrived at the beginning of cinema. Is this base content really so much baser than the entertainment of the past?