Is Marvel Doomed?

E very superhero has an origin story: the initial event that sets the hero on a path to greatness. For the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the most consistently high-performing brand in movies of the past 15 years, it was 2008’s Iron Man. Starring Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and his heroic persona, Iron Man was a hit. From then through 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, Marvel put forth a dizzying array of interconnected movies, with the characters jumping in and out of one another’s flicks and occasionally crossing over en masse. And it worked: The 32 movies made almost $30 billion worldwide. The few misfires and middling results along the way were largely forgiven, swept up in the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the franchise.

Every superhero also faces challenges — and a villain (typically a dark mirror of the hero). Now, Marvel itself faces serious challenges to its own success, and they come from the only source that could defeat it: itself.

The Marvels, released in theaters this past weekend, shows some of these challenges and the effect they are having. Box-office figures for MCU No. 33 are grim. Its North American opening-weekend gross of $46 million is the worst of any MCU film dating back to 2008. That includes some movies many have probably forgotten about entirely, such as The Incredible Hulk (starring the soon-recast Edward Norton) and Thor: The Dark World (begrudgingly aired on FX during its Saturday-afternoon Marvel marathons, ideal for folding laundry). It’s also a drop of more than $100 million from the opening weekend of Captain Marvel, the 2019 film starring Brie Larson to which this is a direct sequel. It’s even below some comic-book movies from the past year or so that were widely seen as disappointments, such as The Flash. Critics, who are generally kind to if rarely rapturous about Marvel’s offerings, were not too keen on it either.

It’s an embarrassing result, below even the most pessimistic projections. And an ominous one for the MCU. The post-Endgame aimlessness that has inspired many (including me, back in 2021) to wonder whether Marvel had peaked has become plain to see. It was, in part, inevitable, and not in the way the archvillain Thanos merely claimed to be. As a recent article in Time on Marvel’s troubles noted, “The years following 2019’s Avengers: Endgame were always going to be a rebuilding period for the MCU.” The build-up of characters and storylines from 2008 to 2019 was meticulous and multifaceted. And the unifying presence of the “Infinity Stones” as all-powerful MacGuffins and Thanos as the antagonist seeking them gave a unifying thread. It would take a while to replace that. But Marvel has sure been taking its time. Though some of the post-Endgame efforts, such as Spider-Man: No Way Home, have been compelling in their own right, there has yet to be a coherent and propulsive narrative drive to the MCU post-Endgame. In the sprawling “multiverse” that seems to be Marvel’s next big thing, things are happening, movies (and TV shows) are coming out, but it’s not clear why.

A related challenge has been filling out an interesting cast again. Endgame cashiered Downey Jr., Chris Evans (Captain America), and Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow). Cancer tragically claimed Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther). The futures of Chris Hemsworth (Thor) and Tom Holland (Spider-Man) in the MCU are uncertain. Those new characters who have yet to prove they can carry the franchise are at least in a better position than complete non sequiturs such as the “Eternals,” from the 2021 misbegotten film of the same name, whose attempt to broaden the Marvel universe has been seemingly forgotten by both the moviegoing public and the studio itself. Then there’s Jonathan Majors, whose Kang the Conqueror, a multiverse-spanning villain properly introduced in the middling Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, is supposed to be the new Thanos. Majors is currently embroiled in a domestic-violence controversy in which he will soon face trial. At a Marvel executive retreat earlier this year that film-trade publication Variety described in a recent article as “angst-ridden,” there were discussions of replacing him entirely. The effort to carry on without the principals of the prior period has gone so poorly that some Marvel brass are contemplating returning the original cast for a new “Avengers” movie, which would require the comic-book-classic method of convenient resurrection, at least for the killed-off Iron Man and Black Widow. However common this may be in the comics, that it is being considered at all is a sign of desperation.

Also reeking of desperation have been certain Marvel moves toward cultural relevance. Most Marvel movies had few attempts at political messaging of any kind. The closest was the anti-surveillance-state message of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, an entertaining partial throwback to the 1970s paranoia genre. But a moment in Endgame gave a foretaste of the kind of ham-fisted cultural messaging to come: when, in the middle of a chaotic battle, all of the main female heroes, some of whom were quite far from one another, doing different things, inexplicably assemble to be badass together. Since then, such pointless displays have crept in to much of the offered product, making representation and messaging primary and good storytelling secondary. The perspicacious Critical Drinker, who saw Marvel’s troubles coming long ago, likes to cite Sam Walson as the new Captain America haranguing a senator in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the so-earnest-it’s-practically-parody feminist rant by the title character in She-Hulk (both Disney+ TV offerings). These messages have become such a distraction that they have now helped delay an adaptation of Blade (previously played to perfection by Wesley Snipes). Blade is practically cool defined: a half-vampire who hunts evil vampires and wears black trench coats. This, per Variety, is what the geniuses of Marvel considered doing with that material:

One person familiar with the script permutations says the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons. Blade was relegated to the fourth lead, a bizarre idea considering that the studio had two-time Oscar winner [Mahershala] Ali on board.

But the biggest problem with Marvel now is Marvel. That is, too much of it. Aside from the steady churn of movies, a lot but manageable in the 2008–19 era, there is now an entire sideshow of Disney+ shows. Disney, since 2009 Marvel’s parent company, began pouring resources into the shows during the Covid theatrical lull, to keep the content mill turning. According to Variety, there was a “mandate” that “there would never be a lapse in superhero fare, with either a film in theaters or a new television series streaming at any given moment.” This proved, in the first place, logistically difficult, taxing visual-effects crews to the point of producing shoddy/incomplete material (and unionizing). It has also turned following the twists and turns of the MCU, challenging but not insurmountable when only the movies mattered, into “homework,” to use Time’s word for it. The Marvels demonstrates this: Two of its three main characters were introduced in Disney+ shows, and it is a direct sequel to one (Secret Invasion), much as Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (poorly) expanded on WandaVision. It’s just too much to expect any more than a small, dedicated audience to follow all of this; the more each offering becomes interdependent in this fashion, the smaller that audience will get.

At the risk of turning myself into anecdata, I am proof of this. Unwilling to invest in the Disney+ shows, I have become an erratic Marvel moviegoer, sometimes pleased with what I see and at other times underwhelmed. And I had no interest in The Marvels, which I have not seen and will not. I saw every Marvel movie from 2008 to 2019 (save Thor: The Dark World, until one particularly lazy Saturday afternoon a year or two ago). That includes Captain Marvel, which had some on-the-nose messaging and an overpowered central character ill-served by an uninterested actress, but also the benefit of being sandwiched between Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, making it seem essential to the latter. No such trickery was available to The Marvels, which helps explain its massive drop-off.

So don’t let anyone try to blame this on the just-ended Screen Actors Guild strike, superhero fatigue, or some other unique exogenous factor. A movie with no major stars, based on a jump-scare video game, just outgrossed The Marvels in its opening weekend. And superhero movies can still succeed. Just this year, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did fine, as did the animated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Excuses won’t cut it: The MCU is in real trouble, for the first time in its superheroic history. Correcting course will require settling on a definitive post-Endgame narrative, proving that new cast members can shine just as the old ones did, avoiding pointless attempts at cultural relevance, cutting down on the flow of content, and making full use of the new properties, such as X-Men and Fantastic Four, that have finally been absorbed into the Disney vortex. It looks like Marvel is already taking, or at least considering, some of these steps. But if things don’t change quickly, then its days as a pop-culture and box-office superhero may soon come to an end.