People don't want to watch an intellectual show but they want to feel like they are. This demands writers take the subject matter of non-intellectual things very serious and treat it with great reverence.

People don't want that because the only providers of media don't want to create it. Creating intellectual media is risky and often not-profitable. So they want to provide simple subject matter and some have been smart enough to dress it up as highly intellectual (A24). I am not dissing A24, I like their movies, but intellectual movies that aren't actually intellectual is definitely a brand. That's literally Nolan's whole shtick.

Writers/Directors/Actors don't want the baby media, they want to create their own stuff. But they aren't allowed to do that if they want a job. They don't want to throw away their lives making baby media so they're also forced into playing this role of elevating simple shit to intellectualism. Some elevate it by taking the subject really serious (The Dark Knight, The Batman), and some try to elevate it by making it political. So they take a story about a polish wizard who fights monsters and tries to make it about the struggles of a secondary character. It starts to get messy here because we're leaving the pure materialist underpinning of why this stuff happens and going into a bunch of cultural stuff around politics and expression. Mainly because most political action in the US has been reduced only to artistic expression.

I haven't seen Barbie yet but that is probably the exact same thing. A baby thing elevated by writers who struggle for an actual outlet but can only express simplistic political statements due to living under a liberal and often reactionary order.