You’ve never seen a movie like Deadpool. Unless you saw Deadpool this weekend. Which, judging by the box office, you probably did. Ryan Reynolds (technically director Tim Miller’s) ten-years-in-the-making superhero comedy has made an enormous splash this month, pulling in a $137 million profit domestically in its opening weekend – the all time record for an R-rated movie.

But before you download your digital tickets, put on your cosplay costumes, and grab your fake IDs, stop to consider your options. You are currently tottering, unaware on the precipice of an important turning point in cinema history, and it’s all riding on Deadpool and a movie you may not have even heard of: the newest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, Hail Caesar. You are taking place in a worldwide census; an appraisal of the entire human condition, and upon which film you, and, as extension, the entirety of America decide to drop your proverbial two cents will decide the future of American cinema.

The two movies could not be more different on the surface, but they actual have similar themes. Both are highly satirical and mercilessly mock the movie industry, but they do it in entirely different ways, and Deadpool’s sense of humor in this regard had it set with an enormous advantage from the get-go.

Let’s talk about ad campaigns. Deadpool had promotions, cross promotions, trailers, tweets. It had one of the loudest and most effective ad campaigns of all time. Caesar had nothing in comparison. The occasional internet trailer can’t match up to Ryan Reynolds’ full time publicity stunt. In the modern movie market, publicity is everything, but there’s an inherent difference between these two movies in particular that allows Deadpool this huge advantage. Deadpool is quips. The entire movie is an enormous, heartfelt, hard earned collection of hundreds of hilarious quips compiled together into the semblance of a story. Quips are something you can put into a trailer. They get attention. They’re funny without context. Caesar, on the other hand, is a collection of feelings. An enormous, well designed compilation of tones put together to create the semblance of a joke. You don’t laugh at Caesar’s humor in a vacuum. It takes the entire movie experience to build up the tone, the situations, the characters that release in nervous, inevitable laughter. Maybe the Coens didn’t work like Reynolds to get their movie seen, but no amount of work could have made their movie look as appealing in a trailer as Deadpool looks the instant he gets on screen.

So how will you make your choice? Will you follow popular media into the land of memes and commercialism, or become a movie hipster, committed to subtleties and art? Deadpool is cheating right? Its juvenile sense of humor combined with pandering ad campaigns gave it an unfair advantage, and the blind masses have flocked to it. Art is dead. That’s what I’m saying, right? Wrong. Deadpool is just a better movie than Hail Caesar. In the end that’s what it boils down to. It’s genius, actually. They were able to take a character actually built on his own shallowness and make a compelling, hilarious movie and a fascinating character through sheer volume of said shallowness. It’s a feat, and Hail Caesar pales in comparison. The only legitimate criticism I have of Deadpool is that 15 minutes in I was already exhausted from laughing at every joke they made. If this is the path Hollywood is taking, then I’m glad to be along for the ride.