[COLUMN] Maybe It's Okay That Marvel Is No Longer the Biggest Thing in the World | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It has been a rough couple of months for Marvel Studios.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania under-performed with critics and audiences, grossing far less than the $600m that it needed to turn a profit. The studio is heavily retooling its  upcoming Daredevil series, which was already well into production. A bombshell story from Variety a couple of weeks ago reported on chaos inside the studio. More recently, The Marvels had the franchise’s lowest opening weekend ever, following it up with the studio’s worst second-weekend drop of all-time.

Of course, it’s important not to overstate the case. Marvel Studios enjoyed significant success with James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. That film played very well with critics and performed impressively at the box office. However, that success is tempered somewhat by the fact that Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 often feels like a critique of the company’s production process and was directed by a filmmaker who has left the studio to manage one of their chief rivals.

More to the point, it seems fair to acknowledge that Marvel Studios is perhaps just experiencing the same challenges facing the larger genre and arguably franchise filmmaking in general. After all, Quantumania is far from the only superhero film to underperform this year. In absolute terms, it outgrossed The Flash, Shazam!: Fury of the Gods and Blue Beetle. More broadly, blockbusters like Fast X and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny have struggled to break even on their budgets.

However, at a time when most of the major studios are in one form of crisis or another and most major franchises are struggling to find their footing, the trials and tribulations of Marvel Studios tend to generate a disproportionate amount of attention. There is a very simple reason for this. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) is the most successful film franchise in the world and Marvel Studios was (until very recently) an unstoppable cultural juggernaut.

It’s hard to overstate the influence that Marvel Studios has had on the past decade-and-a-half of popular culture. Avengers: Endgame was briefly the biggest movie of all time, unadjusted for inflation. It perfected a certain kind of blockbuster filmmaking, to the point that the phrase “Marvel movies” has become a loaded and evocative term in debates about the state of film as an artform. That’s a level of cultural pervasiveness on par with Coca-Cola or McDonald’s.

Much like Netflix has become a surrogate for the streaming wars, with “the Great Netflix Correction” or “the Netflix Strike”, Marvel Studios have come to fully embody a particular movement in film production and distribution. As such, the brand is subject to an incredible level of scrutiny. This is, in large part, because they are so big and so inescapable. Anything looks like an underdog when placed next to the company. Inevitably, the troubles of Marvel Studios become headline news.

To be clear, it’s hard to feel much real sympathy for Disney and Marvel Studios in all of this. Marvel has enjoyed more than a decade of cultural dominance. It accomplished everything that a company could hope to achieve. Marvel helped Disney make more money in the first half of 2019 than any studio made in any year ever. By the end of 2019, Disney accounted for 40% of the American box office. That same year, Disney bought Fox, one of the “big six” Hollywood studios.

There’s a great moment in “The Suitcase”, an episode of Mad Men. Working late in the office, Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) complains that Don Draper (Jon Hamm) never says “thank you” for the work that she does. Draper replies, indignantly, “That’s what the money is for.” Any sense of tragedy or sorrow around the potential cultural decline of Marvel Studios is softened by the reality the company has had a pretty good (and insanely profitable) run and reshaped the market in its image.

More than that, Marvel’s current woes aren’t just bad luck. Many of them are a result of choices made while the company was in its “imperial phase.” Audiences’ exhaustion with these properties is a direct result of Bob Iger’s decision to maximize output, flooding the market with product, a mistake that even he acknowledges. The lack of quality with the streaming shows is down to the creation of an internal corporate culture that ignores the importance of writers to television production.

It’s easier to feel sympathy for the artists who are the victims of (and often the scapegoats for) this corporate decline. Nia DaCosta has acknowledged that she took the job directing The Marvels to pay off her student debt and how it’s not really her movie, “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie.” She should not be blamed for the movie’s underperformance in the current climate. The production team on Echo deserve better than to have their show burnt off in a single dump streaming release.

Still, it’s easy to create the illusion that the sky is falling. In reality, Marvel Studios is doing relatively okay. Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 will finish in the top ten films of the year at the box office. Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania will likely finish in the top fifteen. If that film had been budgeted more reasonably – closer to the $150m budget of the original Ant-Man – the company would be in a much healthier shape. Marvel Studios are still a major force in Hollywood.

They just aren’t the biggest show in town. The company is well past that peak that ran from 2012 to 2019, when The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame all topped either the annual global or domestic box office charts of their respective years. Instead of having the highest-grossing movie of the year, Marvel may have to settle for fifth position.

This may be humbling, but it was also inevitable. Writer Joanna Robinson, author of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, argues that the studio will bounce back from its current woes, but is unlikely to ever reach the cultural and commercial peak of Avengers: Endgame ever again. There is nothing wrong with that. Trends end. Fads die out. Particular genres, styles and even actors all have a shelf life in Hollywood. Nobody gets to be king of the hill forever. Times change.

Indeed, if one takes a larger look at the movie calendar, one can see that audiences seem to have an appetite for new experiences and new concepts. It seems like there is a change in the air. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a three-hour partially black-and-white biopic about a scientist without a movie star lead, is the third-highest grossing movie of the year. Taylor Swift’s The Era Tour has breathed new life into cinemas.

In terms of intellectual property, audiences are turning out for under-exploited brands rather than tried-and-tested franchises. Filmgoers largely ignored Rise of the Beasts, the seventh Transformers film in the past twenty years. However, they turned out en masse for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the first theatrical Super Mario movie in more than a quarter of a century. Horror fans avoided The Exorcist: Believer, but flocked to Five Nights at Freddy’s. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a behemoth.

Honestly, it's good for the wider culture that Marvel no longer occupies that central space, that it no longer exists as the central pillar around which the rest of pop culture orbits. While these are all movies based on pre-existing intellectual properties, it is good to see movies like Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water and Barbie at the top of the box office. There is a much greater diversity of genre, perspective and tone among those hits than there is among the comparable MCU movies.

It’s also nice to see a younger generation finding their own pop culture instead of relying on hand-me-downs from their elders. Modern movie-goers deserve better than to inherit their parents’ favorite franchises. Given that some Swifties were asking if they could keep their commemorative popcorn tubs, it seems likely that The Eras Tour marked the first trip to the cinema for a lot of fans. A quick browse of TikTok suggests that the same is true for many attending Five Nights at Freddy’s.

This is also good for Marvel. In hindsight, maybe the studio should have taken a proper break after Avengers: Endgame, a movie that served as a natural jumping-off point. To quote Pauly Shore, “Sometimes you have to go away to come back.” The studio is only releasing a single movie in 2024: Deadpool 3. By way of contrast, Sony is releasing three superhero films next year: Kraven the Hunter, Madame Web and Venom 3. In the long term, it might be healthy for the company’s legacy and image to no longer be the face of modern blockbuster (or even superhero) cinema.

It could also be good for the company creatively. With less pressure and a lower profile, the company might feel liberated – or even mandated – to take creative and commercial risks. There is a certain creative stagnancy to the modern MCU. As Chris Miller argued when asked about superhero fatigue, it’s really “a movie that feels like a movie I’ve seen a dozen times before” fatigue. As Variety critic Owen Gleiberman contended, the solution to superhero fatigue is to make better movies.

The public is ready for something new and exciting, just like these movies were once new and exciting. If Marvel can realize that, if the studio can seize on that opportunity, it can reinvent itself. The studio needs to be apportioning lower budgets and taking bigger risks, trusting its creatives rather than overruling them in post-production. It remains to be seen if the studio will take this lesson on board, given how hard the post-credits scene of The Marvels and the premise of Deadpool 3 lean on nostalgia for a decades-old franchise.

It would be great to see an adjustment of expectations both inside and outside Marvel, so that each of these movies and television shows didn’t need to be the biggest or best thing ever. It would be healthy for everybody involved, including the fandom, to accept that these projects are no longer as all-encompassing as they once were. Of course, the genre is grappling with this anxiety in its own way, with many recent superhero movies being movies about how important superheroes are.

Still, the past few months have demonstrated that Marvel Studios are no longer on top of the world. That’s okay though. The world is a big place. There’s a lot to see and explore, and sometimes it’s hard to see clearly from the top.