In the last month or so, I have had my brain pummelled by Robert Downey jun flying around in a techno-suit, Adam Sandler as an invincible (and priapic) former Mossad agent, Steve Carell as a nerdy, indestructible super spy, Harrison Ford as a Teflon 60-year-old archaeologist, Edward Norton as the incredibly angry green dude - which I admit I missed but saw the ads.
I did, however, catch an early screening of Will Smith as a hung-over but still unbeatable superhero.
And I still have The Dark Knight and Hellboy II: The Golden Army to go. I don't know how many more superhero movies I can take.
Some were good superhero movies. Some were bad superhero movies. Yet, they're all beginning to merge as a very long series of whammies, and fireballs and ironic quips.
In my mind, which might have been addled by the decibel level in the theatres, Hancock is taking down Indiana Jones. Zohan canoodles and karate chops Agent 99.
My butt is kicked. Your butt is kicked. Sigh.
With Hancock, which opens on Thursday, Hollywood has gone all meta, giving us a superhero - Smith - who has lost his mojo, a drunken power ranger having an existential crisis.
No fear, here's a sunny PR guy (Jason Bateman) to the rescue.
I laughed at Hancock's politically incorrect dismissal of superhero couture, and did fall under the sway of the cosmic time-twisting conundrums of superhero love.
As superhero dramas go, I'd give it three capes. But the pure boom-boom factor of the genre made me feel bludgeoned.
Again.
All right, maybe it's just me. I'm not a 14-year-old boy; so all this superhero firepower isn't hitting me in the solar plexus.
But I did take my 5-year-old son shopping at the weekend and bought him a whole array of superhero underpants.
He really likes wearing Hulk on his butt. Sometimes he wears his underpants backwards so he can just look down and see his jolly green friend more easily.
Maybe it comforts him on some level. Empowers him.
I've been told by a bevy of pop culture watchers that my son is more in tune with the collective unconscious than me.
Author Peter Biskind, who has written books about movies and culture in the 1950s, '70s and '90s, assures me that superheroes return with bad times.
Superman reached huge status during World War 2. The gas crisis and economic malaise of the Carter years begat Superman again - with the Christopher Reeve incarnation.
And now, well, given the subprime mortgage crisis, the morass in Iraq and oil prices, we need Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Iron Man, all at once.
"Who doesn't want a superhero when the world is in trouble?" asks marketing guru Jane Buckingham of the Youth Intelligence Group, which studies young people.
"Who doesn't want somebody to come save the day when the world is a mess? Life is hard. We are going through bad economic times. The environment is in trouble. There are looming terrorists."
Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer who produced Hancock along with action maestro Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice), points out that the psychology of Hollywood's superheroes has deepened of late.
"Our view of heroes is evolving. They used to be pretty two-dimensional, and just good guys or gals. Now they seem to be human beings that have stumbled and have to find their way again. We want our heroes a little more moody. We want our heroes to struggle a little more and earn the chance to be righteous, and not just imagine it's a birthright."
Indeed, as experienced with Frank Miller's revisionist Batman graphic novel of the late '80s, superheroes routinely have faced crises of confidence.
They cry now.
They need to pop Xanax before they get back to the hard task of saving civilisation.
But, clearly, rescue fantasies are in the air. Of course, I might be way over-thinking this phenomenon. Maybe it's just all about the money that showers into Hollywood coffers.
I understand why more and more Oscar-calibre actors do them - it's a way to pump up one's box-office clout.
Just a few months ago, I interviewed Robert Downey jun, right before Iron Man opened.
"The whole environment is geared around what happens to this one character," Downey explained.
"The whole world is retrofitted to tell one person's story. It's pretty cool."
Who's complaining? As screenwriter David Koepp (Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) notes: "Hollywood is only obsessed with superheroes because audiences seem to be. As soon as audiences are not, Hollywood will scrape them off its shoe."
