It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson here with our longstanding superhero team up.

Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Genevieve Koski.

Here on The Next Picture Show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context.

So every other week, we get together to talk over a classic film and consider how it relates to a current movie. This week, we've got two groups of superheroes fighting to save huge numbers of lives while pursuing their own tiny personal plot arcs. Scott, do we have a Hulk? What? No. Where will we even get one of those? Ugh, damn it. I was really hoping I'd get to do the line.

Do we at least have a quick summary of the two films we're covering this week?

That I can do.

Avengers Infinity War, directed by brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, just broke a whole slew of box office records,

including making a billion dollars at the box office faster than any previous film.

It's the culmination of a decade of build-up for Marvel Studios, with characters from 18 previous Marvel Cinematic Universe films

teaming up to fight Thanos, a powerful alien out to literally kill half the universe. The team-up at

X-2, Marvel's X-Men movie from 2003, is much smaller. But like Infinity War, it does feature disparate groups, in this case, Professor X's X-Men movie from 2003 is much smaller, but like Infinity War, it does feature

disparate groups, in this case Professor X's X-Men, his frenemy Magneto and Magneto loyalist

mystique, joining forces to stop a scheming army colonel who's out to kill every mutant on

Earth. It's two different Marvel movies about villains' mad genocidal plans and heroes' desperate

bids to stop them. Both films use some of the same tricks to bring four-color heroes to a live-action

setting, and both films are openly middle chapters of ongoing stories, continuing plotlines

or previous films, and lining up pins for the next film in the series. In this week's first episode, we'll look at X2,

consider where Marvel was 15 years ago,

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