Greta Gerwig’s Narnia? Barry Jenkins’ Lion King? It’s time to bring back hacks.

“Wait, who directed The Meg 2?” As the release of Meg 2: The Trench drew nigh, my social media feeds were filled with people aghast at the news that the latest project from Ben Wheatley, the film-festival favorite behind movies like Free Fire and Kill List, was the sequel to a movie in which Jason Statham fights a prehistoric shark. Even Oscar winners like William Wyler and John Huston were deemed mere directors, because their filmographies offered insufficient evidence of the persistent visual style and thematic concerns that comprise an auteur’s signature. Whatever Kevin Feige might say in interviews, a studio like Marvel doesn’t really hire a Sundance phenom like Chloé Zhao to direct a movie like Eternals because they’re looking for her to make it personal, nor are they gambling that her experience making lyrical neorealist dramas on Native American reservations with nonprofessional actors makes her especially qualified to steer the battleship that is a $200 million superhero movie. When the Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel met with Marvel to discuss directing Black Widow, she said the studio told her not to “worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that.” Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is the most individual movie in the entire MCU, but even there, there’s a vast drop-off between the elegantly choreographed casino brawl and the final battle, in which weightless digital creations collide to a spectacular lack of effect. But now that Peyton Reed is three Ant-Man movies in, it seems like everything turned out for the best: Wright got to make original movies like Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho, not to mention a two-hour documentary about a cult band, and no one has to mourn the loss of the deeply idiosyncratic films Reed might have made if he weren’t occupied with studio product, since he never showed much inclination to make them in the first place.