Marvel- Geddon
How Marvel's Money Making Machine Ran Out of Steam and How it Can Get it Back
Since 2008, nothing has defined Hollywood big blockbuster moviemaking quite like Marvel has. Marvel took a big risk on serial drug abuser and rehab afficiando Robert Downey Jr. at the time, putting the future of the whole studio in his hands when no one would insure him for a production if he were to not be able to complete the film. Seeing this as his last chance sobered him up seemingly for good and he delivered his career defining perfomance. Since then in film after film after film, Marvel could do no wrong. After being sold to Disney, the Mouse House immediately repurposed much of Marvel’s content into streaming where it has been a cornerstone since Disney+ first appeared. Climaxing with the two part, both multi- Billion Dollar Blockbuster Club films Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, it seemed Marvel could do no wrong.
But then chinks started appearing in Iron Man’s armor. The bloated “Eternals” became the first real huge bomb for Marvel. Some of it’s streaming shows, like “She-Hulk” were inept duds with poor special effects and even more mediocre storytelling. And then came Marvel’s “Phase 5.” Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania was a cartoonish disaster and then Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 seemed like a dark, uninspired and derivative ending to what had previously been one of Marvel’s consistently lighthearted and fun franchises.1 Early news on the next film in Phase Five, “The Marvels” has been brutal and appears like it will continue Marvel’s recent losing streak. The good news is that the next films are all on hold until after the SAG-AFTRA strike gets settled and with the writers back, there’s time to tighten up scripts and spend extra time on VFX completion.
Nontheless, it’s really worth the time to talk about what has caused Marvel’s struggles and what the odds are that they can right the ship.
The Characters
Every comic book story begins with the “origin story” describing how the hero became a superhero. Since the 1960s, there are some very well known comic book superheros that even if you never read a single comic, you’d probably be able to recognize. Iron Man. Thor. Captain America. Spider-Man. Hulk.2 People come into those movies with a sense of the background. There’s something to build off of.
In addition, those early films are more self contained. You don’t need to know anything outside of what is being shown to you in the movie to understand what is going on. They’re more simple, sticking to a pretty common plot formula, just like comic books are. By the end of the movie, they’re wrapped up in a nice ending that ties up all the loose ends. Cue credit scenes to tease the next Marvel project.
As the origin stories for those blue chip comic stories turned into sequels and trilogies, or even origin stories for lesser known “heroes” the audience just gets less interested. The plots become more convoluted and more dependent on what has come before. More gets inserted into overly bloated stories out of fan service or setting up the next film down the road than it does progression of a plot or working to keep it concise.
By the current phase, we’re dealing with second and third tier characters and rehashes of everything we’ve seen before.
The Original Actors are gone.
One of the things selecting Downey Jr. early on did was allow Marvel to lock him into a long term contract for multiple films on the cheap. He became Iron Man not just by starring in the one film and its sequels, but by appearing in a total 10 different Marvel films. Chris Evans was a good actor but not a household name until he became Captain America. Chris Hemsworth as Thor. Scarlett Johannsen, probably the only core Avenger who had a strong career before signing onto Marvel, was Black Widow, the person holding the whole team together. Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye. It was a solid team of icons filled with a stable of some of the most bankable stars in Hollywood.
But their contracts largely ended with Endgame. Endgame marked the end for Downey and Evans. Scarlett starred in Black Widow which was filmed before Endgame’s release, but released after it; it served more as a handoff to a similar character played by Florence Pugh. Hemsworth starred in one more poorly received Thor movie. Renner starred in a decent streaming show which was a handoff to the next generation also. Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury is still around SHIELD but nobody else is, and even his last outing in “Secret Invasion” was painful to watch. People are just less excited about the next crop of Marvel Heroes and the actors who portray them.
The Special Effects
The VFX have been a cornerstone of Marvel since its inception. Movies were spaced out enough where they could get large teams to work on them and ensure that everything looked good and polished before release. As more films get put out, there’s more VFX work to do. The more projects being put out in a shorter timeframe, the less resources you have and quality suffers.
Once Disney started pushing Marvel for more series on top of the movies already being churned out, VFX teams started getting thin. Plus some of the larger films like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, require many more VFX shots. We’ve reached a point where every Marvel film requires substantial time in post production for VFX shots and they just don’t have people or time to do it. The quality for many of the most recent projects have been dreadful and cartoonish at best. Just try to watch Quantumania and not think you are watching some cheesy cartoon.
The Plots
There are two ways you can make a comic book movie. You can downplay the more comic book aspects and adapt it for a more realistic approach. The Dark Knight, largely the film most agree as one of the best, does this.
Alternatively, you can keep some of the comic book aspects and play it up for some cheesy, kitschy value, as fill in for the action. It’s not to be taken seriously, its more just an entertaining brief consideration before the next action sequence. You tend to not pay the abstract, ridiculous stuff any mind when its in small doses. There’s a risk there though too, and that is the more cheesy it gets, the less the audience suspends disbelief and it almost becomes comedic, laughable.
The further away Marvel gets away from the origin stories, and the more grander the villain and their schemes, the more abstract and convoluted the plot gets, until all you have is a ridiculous and stupid story. This was a huge problem with many of the more recent films going back to the Multiverse of Madness. The introduction of Kang as a villain has only exacerbated the mindnumbingly awful complexity of cartoonishness. From early stories about The Marvels, this is one of the major problems with the film. The worst offender was Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings, which was fantastic right up until it got into a stupifying final act that was quite laughably dumb.
Lately the introduction of the multiverse has bogged everything down. When stories revolve around multiple versions of the same character on different timelines in different multiverses, the stakes seem so much more infinitely less important. Killing Captain America in one multiverse is a lot less important since there’s always another one they’ll just make a movie on.3 Stopping Dormammu on one timeline doesn’t mean he’s been stopped on all of them. The stakes amount to nothing. Why care?
The Villains
Lastly there are the villains. What really makes a good comic book movie, is a great villain. Origin stories and earlier films focused on a single villain, usually the hero’s arch-nemesis. Marvel began to serialize the MCU by having villains servants of Thanos leading up to Infinity War. It worked great, Thanos is still the best villain the MCU has produced. Since then, it’s been one mediocre villain after another. Jonathan Majors had the potential to be a decent encompassing menace but Quantumania did him no favors and his offscreen legal problems seems to have diminished his role. Nothing else seems even memorable. The Flag-Smashers from Falcon and Winter Soldier? Please, don’t make me laugh. The “Super Skrulls” of Secret Invasion? I’ll pass.
There’s still opportunities for course correction. Here are five quick suggestions:
Go back to making each story a stand alone. If you want to tease something else, put it in a credits scene. However, every movie should be able to stand entirely on its own.
Better villains. Don’t go half hearted with a mediocre one. Keep them top notch. A mediocre movie can be overcome entirely by a great villain. Now that the X-Men are in the MCU, there’s a great opportunity for some fantastic villain crossovers.4
Spread out content. Give the VFX workers time to complete the jobs. Some of these films are becoming unwatchable with leaden VFX bogging them down.
Good stories. Keep the stakes grounded in the here and now. Get away from the multiverse of mediocrity. It was fun in Loki, it’s been tedious in every film since then (except for Spider Man: No Way Home where they played it up by uniting all the previous versions of Spider Man and their villains, something they can’t do for others since there aren’t three different actors who played Thor or Captain America).
Spend some time building up the new characters amd actors taking over for the blue chips, and give audiences a reason to like them.
Marvel’s still rolling in billions. The only real question on it’s future outlook is if they can right the course, keep it to a slow decline, or whether it flat out crashes and burns.
PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner
When it comes to Marvel films, everyone has their favorite films and characters. Here are my top five:
Guardians of the Galaxy. From the first moments with Star Lord dancing across the surface of Morag to “Come and Get Your Love” I was hooked. Not only was it a ragtag A-Team of misfits, it was boatloads of fun watching them fumble through one misadventure after another.
Iron Man. Yes, the first real MCU film (other than those Hulks) is one of the best. It set the standard for all Marvel films, and in Robert Downey Jr, and it upended the superhero dynamic. It really is a fantastic piece of action filmmaking.
Avengers: Infinity War. Josh Brolin’s Thanos was pitch perfect and easily the best MCU villain ever. That WTF ending had everyone talking for a year too.
Avengers: Endgame. I’m of the belief that this is actually a pretty mediocre movie for the first half, although it does show some pretty neat nostalgic MCU moments and places. But its that last 75 minutes that make it one of the best, most epic, completely bonkers, battle sequences in film.5
Doctor Strange. The perfect synergy of character, special effects, story and a completely fantastic ending where the hero genuinely outsmarts the villain, something that rarely happens in comic book films.
PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day
One of the great things Marvel does is pay homage to the people who helped make these great comic books years ago. Stan Lee appearing in all the MCU films is one example, but my favorite involves fellow Wisconsinite, Mark Gruenwald.
As the head of story continuity at Marvel, Mark was a stickler for detail and timelines and had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that ever happened in all these comic books. When Marvel began the series of comic books for “Loki” where there was a Time Variance Authority overseeing the many different changes, variations and alterations to individual timelines, they made everyone who worked there at the TVA look like Mark, since for all practical purposes, it was what he did on a daily basis:
Mark died in the early 1980s, and his ashes were actually mixed into the paint used to make a special edition of Marvel Comics. When Loki was made into a streaming show, they made sure to give homage to him by making a Loki scene occur in his hometown. When he died, he donated much of his comic book collection, including many first or special editions, to the Oshkosh Public Library.6
PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject
What else is on?
—Me, 24/7
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Footnotes and Fun Stuff
Part of this can be attributed to some of the ordeals caused by James Gunn. Gunn was fired from Marvel following Volume 2 due to #MeToo sexual harassment accusations, some of which was associated with his now wife, Jennifer Holland. The rest of the cast refused to do another unless Gunn was reinstated. He was eventually reinstated, but not before Gunn became the de facto head of DC Films, Marvel’s main comic story rival. Knowing this was their last GOTG film, the actors seemed very much to be going through the motions just to get it done and over with.
Hulk has a rough go in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first attempt with Eric Bana directed by auteur Ang Lee failed miserably. A follow up starring Edward Norton years later was better and more in line with what MCU CEO Kevin Feige wanted but again failed at the box office. For, “The Avengers” the role was picked up by Mark Ruffalo who was praised for it, but he has yet to star in his own stand-alone Hulk film.
I’ll add, compounding this issue is the show “What If..” where they actually play that game.
An example of this was Juggernaut appearing in Deadpool 2. THAT, was a great crossover villain.
True story, the house I most recently bought had a theatre room in it. The agent took us through it and on the screen at the time was the start of the scene when Captain America catches Mjolnir and says “AVENGERS! ASSEMBLE!” in stereo surroundsound. I leaned into my wife’s ear and said “We are SO getting this house.”
On a side note, growing up in the area as a kid, I had never known ANY of this until the scene from Loki. Looking further into it, it turns out he grew up only a few blocks from the house I lived in when I graduated high school. I seriously wonder how many of the same things I saw every day growing up eventually made it’s way into Marvel Comics in some way.