Why Too Much Marvel Became The Company's Kryptonite
While many of the cracks in Marvel Studios' armor have been there for a hot minute, it wasn't until 2023 that it became glaringly obvious just how much trouble the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in. Sure, you could argue that something like Jonathan Majors' legal woes was out of its control, but for the most part, the House of Ideas has always been and continues to be its own worst enemy. Whether it entails pushing its visual effects artists beyond their limits, trying (and failing) to bend the way television is produced to its whims, or rushing right into the next major MCU saga without so much as a breather after "Avengers: Endgame" capped off a record-breaking, industry-shaking 11-year run of films, Marvel Studios has committed a whole lot of missteps, and they're finally catching up to it.
That said, if one were to single out a single issue as the company's kryptonite (and I know, I'm mixing comic book brands, but stay with me here), it would have to be the sheer amount of stuff Marvel has churned out since 2020. Yes, folks have been clutching their pearls and going on about the danger of superhero fatigue for a while, yet for many years, the box office told a very different story. As in "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," though, there came a time when that threat was very real and Marvel Studios was too late to recognize that before suffering the consequences.
Now, Variety has published an extensive piece that breaks down the various fires head honcho Kevin Feige and his team are trying to put out at the moment, many of which can be traced back to a misguided decision made in 2020: to start releasing a never-ending stream of Marvel stuff in the first place.
The content must flow
Do you remember what you were doing on December 10, 2020? Because I can assure you that I and every other film and television journalist on the planet remember exactly what we were doing on that date. That was Disney Investor Day 2020, the day when the House of Mouse hosted a webcast announcing an overwhelming plethora of streaming projects for Disney+. Perhaps most notably, that was when Marvel Studios unveiled a massive streaming slate, one that would guarantee (to quote Variety's article) "there would never be a lapse in [MCU] superhero fare, with either a film in theaters or a new television series streaming at any given moment."
To say that covering these announcements was exhausting would be putting it mildly, but that was nothing compared to the toll it took on Marvel's employees. As Variety explains in its writeup, this was all a bid on then-CEO Bob Chapek's part to boost Disney's stock prices in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns. But while it may have made the company's stockholders happy after such a tumultuous year, it quickly proved impossible to sustain from a creative standpoint. As anyone who's kept up with the MCU since 2020 can attest to, "the need to tease out an interwoven storyline over so many disparate shows, movies and platforms created a muddled narrative that baffled viewers" (as Variety puts it).
In addition to causing a whole lot of behind-the-scenes chaos (much of which has now been thoroughly documented), this left even many staunch MCU defenders feeling burnt out after trying to keep up with everything. Not helping matters, many of these films and TV series were also artistically underwhelming, so much so that staying up to speed with the franchise came to feel more like homework than anything.
Not too big to fail
You know the saying about how time makes the heart grow fonder? Had Marvel Studios announced it would be taking, say, a five-year break after "Endgame" to regroup and plot out the future of the MCU, we would probably be sitting here eagerly awaiting the return of the franchise in 2024. Instead, it was handed the impossible task of not just maintaining the same momentum it had amassed over the previous decade but to increase it while at the same time introducing a whole new set of characters to the property.
Wall Street analyst Eric Handler broke down the situation in a statement to Variety:
"The Marvel machine was pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where there was just too much, and they were burning people out on superheroes? It's possible. The more you do, the tougher it is to maintain quality. They tried experimenting with breaking in some new characters, like Shang-Chi and Eternals, with mixed results. With budgets as big as these, you need home runs."
Indeed, there was no room for error in this approach, which is why Marvel immediately pumped the brakes on an "Eternals" sequel after the film's mixed response and has back-burned the "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" follow-up in light of the film's respectable yet, by MCU standards, modest showing. But even if every MCU film and series from the last three years had been well-received, audiences probably would've still reached the point where they started petering off, whether out of a desire for something different or because, well, you can only keep running at the same pace for so long, no matter how much you actually like running.
Otherwise, you're eventually going to fall flat on your face.