In this edition of Cinema Issues we will be talking about the MCU and how we got here.
So firstly lets take stock, the MCU has this year put out three films that all failed to break even, released a few tv series no one talked about, Born Again had worse ratings than Agatha, and moved the big prize of an Avengers film further and further away. Disney as a company has also had a reckoning with their audiences and are now moving away from the message and towards entertainment again. There has been senior people in Marvel leaving or stepping down, audiences have not connected with a lot of the phase four and five, and there is a real possibility that Doomsday may not break a billion dollars.
Let’s look at the year ahead as well before we begin, Doomsday is the big ticket item, though a push to the year after next wouldn’t be a surprise. Then you have Spider-Man which will do well as people like the character, he is probably the most popular remaining MCU character, but each time a Spider-Man film is made Disney has to pay Sony and involve them, which they don’t like. Then you have TV series like the second season of Born Again which could be good but I wouldn’t hold my breath, and then TV shows no one cares about such as Wonder Man and more of their animated stuff. There is a real chance that Spider-Man will be all Marvel has that makes a dent next year if they delay Avengers again.
Marvel went from a studio that seemed untouchable to one that looked like it was falling off, as the kids say real quick.
What got us here and what can be done, at this point I would argue that a reboot is needed. I think that whilst yes you can bring back variants of popular characters, it does not work long term and undermines death as a concept in the MCU. I think a real issue is that the characters brought in the later phases have simply not connected in the way Marvel thought they would, and whilst you can blame a rush to the M-She-U, or the fact that a lot of these were girlbosses without proper arcs, you can ultimately just point back to the fact that a lot of these characters, Riri, Ms Marvel, Kamala Khan, are not popular characters and the comics have been saying that for years. In a sense Marvel thought it was too big to fail and so it could push ahead with whatever agenda you want to think they had and that people would stick around when they didn’t. Rebooting things now and bringing back popular characters can fix the character issue but there are broader things at play.
Within certain sects of Hollywood talent there is a need to be outspoken in a progressive way and to insult your audience or attack them for not liking your progressive masterpiece, this has been seen at Marvel on both a talent, as in actors, and behind the scenes level. A fictional entertainment world should never have been making allegories to the real world as blatant as the MCU, and the crew and staff employed knew making very noticeable political statements online would hurt the audience, but they didn’t seem to care. Particularly amongst the phase four and five stars there has been a need to tell people how to think and to insult those who came up with Marvel since the earliest days of the MCU. I am not going to insult your intelligence and explain why this is a bad business move, but I will say that you can bet your money that Marvel now cares a hell of a lot about their lost audiences and plunging viewing figures. This is why you are seeing very obvious attempts to mend fences, with actors who are making insulting statements slowly being pushed out of the MCU and more and more talk of multiversal cameos to bring back characters fans like. The thing that they don’t seem to get is that whilst the people who made those comments who did the things are still employed, a lot of them are, then people aren’t coming back. Marvel as with all studios needs to do an ideological cull, they need to say right we are an entertainment company anyone that wants to run their mouths about the audience or about politics there is the door, and they need to remove the people who have made the comments in the past as well.
Then you have the major issue that exists in the background to the two other things we have discussed, genres come and go, the Western is a tired comparison but an apt one. Increasingly Marvel releases be them shows or films follow the same structure him the same plot beats, explore the same themes, and where this can work more so in comics wherein you are reading every week to find out what a specific character is doing, it doesn’t work so well in a multiconnected universe wherein you have to see everything that comes out.
As such we find ourselves possible witnessing the death of a titan. I don’t believe any amount of cameos, or even a reboot can save it. What would need to happen is three fold, firstly an entire overhaul of the brain trust and writing teams, apologies made for behaviour that alienated fans, the increased presence of liked characters like Spider-Man and a direction away from it being this big interconnected thing. Even then death may find a way.
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