You know, maybe Thanos had it right after all. I'm just sayin'.

If you know, you know.

Yesterday, the stars of Hollywood's most bankable franchise decided to weigh in on the upcoming election to get out the vote. What happens when this team of creatives, who have helped make billions of dollars in box office, get together to craft their own message? You first check the newspapers to see if the Writers Guild went back on strike.

After having some cringey fun with the concept (amongst themselves, anyway), they land on the message ... "Down With Democracy." At first, it sounds like a bad joke in line with Danai Gurira's "Kamala Forever," but that's actually their pitch.

Tim Young offers a masterpiece of understatement:

Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhh ... as messaging goes, this is less Infinity War and more, uh ... The Marvels. 

Speaking of which, where was Brie Larson? Didn't Marvel build an entire female-empowerment brand around her? That would have worked better for a Harris ad than anything the rest of the stars here put together. Maybe Larson had more sense than the rest of her colleagues and chose to pass on this project. 

Look, I'm not a "shut up and sing" kind of guy. Americans of all walks of life can and should participate in our elections, and I enjoy the work of ... at least half of this group. But "participate" usually means something more than fanfic and mindless cheerleading, and at least half of this group is smart enough to know that. Make an argument, not an idol. 

Worse still, this isn't funny or charming; it's embarrassing. It's infantile, and the message it actually sends is that they all think their fans are infantile too. 

This vapidity demonstrates why celebrity endorsements are usually meaningless except to turn off a large part of the consumer market for their fare. The same is true for newspaper endorsements, which are not only corrosive to their credibility but also just as arrogant as celebrity endorsements. How many people wake up in the morning of Election Day and wonder, "Gee, how will the third lead from that superhero movie want me to vote today?" Or, "I should put aside my own judgment in favor of the guy whose essay I used to line the birdcage this week."

I'll still enjoy the work of these actors in the future (well, half of them, anyway). But for their next project, maybe they should hire better writers. Or hire Thanos, who could take care of that "half of them" issue for future projects. I'd donate an Infinity Stone if it meant we didn't see anything like this in the future.