Marvel: The End?

The Marvels tanked hard over the weekend. It will be Marvel’s lowest opening weekend since the studio started releasing its own movies in 2008. On paper, The Marvels wasn’t a bad idea. Captain Marvel grossed over a billion worldwide, so it makes sense to make a sequel, especially when lower-grossing Marvel movies (e.g. Ant-Man) received follow-ups. It also aimed to payoff two TV shows by adding in Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) from Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) from WandaVision. They also pushed the film back four months to try and work on the VFX as well as fix story problems. This isn’t a case of “Why would anyone greenlight this?” This is a case of audiences having lost interest in what Marvel is selling.

On the one hand, perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised. Marvel was a runaway success for over a decade, and we got a glut of superhero movies not only from Marvel Studios but from competitors as well. Any marketplace that gets saturated will eventually have to shrink as supply outruns demand. The blind optimism that audiences would always want to see a new superhero movie wasn’t borne out by the box office receipts. Disney also put Marvel in a more difficult position as they tried to bridge TV shows with movies, thus making the storyline even tougher to follow. There was also not much time to breathe after the events of Avengers: Endgame, so audiences simply decided that would be their departure point. Anything else was superfluous, and at no point did Marvel make an argument about why these particular stories were so worthwhile. Or, to put it another way, there seemed to be an underlying assumption that audiences would accept every superhero movie because the Marvel brand was strong enough to launch stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy and pull off massive crossover events in the Avengers movies.

Those days are clearly over. So what now?

Marvel Pumps the Breaks

A few days before The Marvels opened, Disney announced they were rescheduling their upcoming slate of Marvel movies. The only movie they’ll have in 2024 is Deadpool 3, which is about as close as they can get to a surefire hit since people like the Deadpool movies (the first two each grossed about $785 million worldwide) and having Hugh Jackman return as Wolverine makes it a must-see event because people want to see him banter with Deadpool after 2009’s widely derided X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It also doesn’t hurt that Deadpool hasn’t been in other Marvel stuff, so as long as you know that Ryan Reynolds is Deadpool and Hugh Jackman is Wolverine, you’ll probably be fine.

After that is where things get fuzzy. Captain America: Brave New World has reportedly wrapped production, but now will apparently go in for massive reshoots. That film may have a shot since people like the Captain America character and even if you didn’t seen The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, you know that Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) got the shield/Captain American mantle at the end of Avengers: Endgame. Still, as we’ve now seen over the past few years, nothing is for certain when it comes to these movies. People will show up for Spider-Man: No Way Home and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, but they’re not as interested in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania or Thor: Love and Thunder. Look as far as this weekend and simply having a sequel featuring a known character isn’t enough to get people back to see Marvel on the big screen.

From there, I feel like everything else is far from settled. Marvel can put movies like Thunderbolts and Blade on the schedule for 2025, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they spike these movies entirely, or at least try to find a way to avoid the massive price tag a Marvel film typically carries. To put it another way, I can easily see Marvel canceling Thunderbolts outright, and only moving forward with Blade if they can make it for less than $80 million (a relatively low number given the soaring costs of modern blockbusters).

Moreover, I don’t think the TV shows will necessarily stop (Disney has invested far too much into Disney+ to allow one of its marquee brands to quit producing series for it), but I think these shows will now standalone like the upcoming Echo where they’re as self-contained as possible. They’ll still exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but they’ll be completely optional. That may not bode too well for Disney+, but Disney and Marvel have to stop the bleeding somewhere, and the experiment to have the shows and movies cross over has clearly failed.

Normal Contraction

To be clear, Marvel Studios isn’t going anywhere. Disney didn’t pay $4 billion to junk the brand at the first sight of trouble, but I do think we’re going to see a major shift that’s unlike anything Marvel has faced since 2008. We’ll likely see fewer movies, fewer shows, and fewer crossovers. Everything Marvel has announced like Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars, could easily get junked within a year or so. The days of Kevin Feige doing a big presentation where he unveils a bunch of logos and release dates are going to be a thing of the past.

Does this mean a full-on reset Crisis on Infinite Earths-style? Does Marvel have to blow everything up and start from scratch in order to bring back the casual fans? I wouldn’t rule anything out, but I don’t know if Marvel wants to press that self-destruct button just yet. Maybe they get desperate and start pleading with Robert Downey Jr. to come back as Iron Man. Maybe they try to get a new Avengers movie off the ground by 2025. But that would be unwise.

Audiences are tired with superheroes overall. They’ll see a big crossover event like Spider-Man: No Way Home or close out a story with Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, but the dismal returns on Quantumania, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, and The Marvels signals that audiences have had their fill. That’s not to say they’ll never see a superhero movie ever again, but they also seem eager to get off the franchise trains. Look at the success of standalone movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer compared to the 7th Mission: Impossible movie and the 5th Indiana Jones movie.

Ultimately, this is good for studios and good for audiences. Studios need more diverse portfolios rather than sinking over $200 million on every superhero blockbuster, and audiences clearly prefer to see different kinds of films at the theater. The current chapter on Marvel is closing, but now we’re allowed to see what comes next instead of more of the same.