My personal sign is when you start seeing awkward collaborations start cropping up. One time when I was thrifting, I picked up a graphic novel that had the Justice League, team with the Power Rangers of all things. I glimpsed into what the plot was about out of morbid curiosity and it was just a plain generic time and dimension thing.
Nothing ever connected between the teams at all. DC Comics, while fledgling at times with how they go about their series and movies, still have far more relevance than Power Rangers do. I think the Power Rangers are just grasping at straws to keep being relevant when people have largely moved on from them.
For me, Will: It’s when… Dustin: The characters in every scene… Max: Talk like… Steve: This.
There are too many characters, and the only way your audience can remember that half of them still exist is… Nancy: For them to start sharing lines.
Oh, yeah, the detectives are all gathered with the Captain, briefing him on what they’ve discovered, and each actor has a line that offers a fact in the case, and they go around the group, and each one tosses in their fact like it was rehearsed, which it was.
In reality, they’d all pool their info, and the main guy would brief the boss, while the others watched. Or maybe they’d brief the boss in private, while everybody else did their jobs, like a real workplace.
But I’ve never been in a meeting where everyone chimed in one line at a time, without interrupting, arguing, stammering, shuffling through pages, etc.
In real life, it would go:
Nancy: Of course! We need to-
Nancy and Steve: dfoi intd foruotm thhoe…
*awkward pause
Nancy and Steve: Go ahea-
*another awkward pause
Nancy and Steve: No, you go ahe-