Marvel Succession — The Sons of Origins
While Disney grapples with real-world human succession, the Marvel Cinematic Universe must do the same.
The Walt Disney Company has historically had a succession problem. When its founder, Uncle Walt himself, passed away suddenly, it seemed to have never occurred to the company what they would do without him at the helm. They carried on, however, through a series of leaders, rarely with there being a methodical, planned, succession. In fact, the last one went so poorly that the company backed up and ordered a do-over by bringing the previous guy, Bob Iger, back to try it again.
Iger’s replacement — #1 or #2 — is not the succession we’re concerned about today, though. What we’re looking at is something far more epic, and quite a bit more fun: The Sons of Marvel.
While a lot has been made about the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most recent box office stumbles, one possible explanation seems under-explored; not that many people actually read comics.
Now hear me out.
The public has a sense of many of these characters through the American pop-cultural zeitgeist. We know them from television and movies and Saturday morning cartoons, and from pop musical references, counter-cultural slogans, and graffiti. Marvel superheroes exist in the back of our brains, but it is a small subsection of the populous who actually read the original source material: good old American comic books.
When the MCU began, the studio could pick from the most well-recognized of these characters and exploit them to great success. Hardly a person alive doesn’t have some sense of who Iron Man is, or Captain America, or Spider-Man. And sure, the Scarlet Witch might not be a character that’s well known, but she’s an Avenger and we know what that is! The Hulk, Thor, Black Panther, Doctor Strange — culturally we have a sense of who these people are and there is a cozy familiarity; even if most couldn’t relate a single storyline before the retellings began in movie theaters in 2008.
It wasn’t impossible for the tier two Marvel-ites to make it; lesser known characters could find their way to successful box office takes as long as they played by two rules: they were couched between the films of several, more familiar, characters, and the movies they were in had to be really REALLY good. (Guardians of the Galaxy, I’m looking at you!)
But it’s hard to deny that the MCU mostly thrived over the last decade and a half by skimming the cream off of the top of the House of Ideas.
So when, in 2019, the momentum of the entertainment behemoth was stopped suddenly with Avengers: Endgame and with the walking away of the two most pivotal characters in the MCU pantheon, Iron Man and Captain America, one would’ve assumed that the next generation of Marvel heroes — the succession to the next torchbearers — would’ve been well planned.
It wasn’t.
Doctor Strange, the Black Panther legacy, Thor, Spider-Man, and Guardians; all continued to do well, but without the support of The Avengers and their overarching story — now seemingly in limbo — lesser culturally iconic characters like Ant-Man and Captain Marvel faltered. Ms. Marvel and Photon never stood a chance. Their futures as well as the futures of Shang-Chi, Nick Fury, Captain America (Sam Wilson), and several others stand firmly in doubt.
These characters were not inculcated upon the massive audience that the MCU had held for so long and now, rather than leveraging the riches wrought by the company early on, they are back at ground zero.
But, like the Bob Iger do-over, they have one more chance. Marvel, over the next two years, is going to introduce the last round of their hyper-pop-culturally known characters — arguably the most well-known superhero teams in comic book history: the Fantastic Four and X-Men. While not the earliest of the popular Marvel characters, Fantastic Four is where the company found its post-World War II identity and truly entered mainstream American consciousness. And what the FF did for the culture of the ’60s and ’70s, X-Men did for the ’80s and beyond. X-Men, in fact, accomplished something that no comic since has managed at anywhere near the title’s level, it brought non-comic readers into the shops to actually read comics. The entire rest of the MCU — the most financially successful film series of all time — hasn’t been able to flick that particular needle very much.
In securing the rights to the two teams, Marvel/Disney has gotten an Iger-style do-over and the need to start succession planning now. Who do they care about AFTER this round of films is over? The chances of getting the same kind of lengthy contracts that Marvel originally managed from their stars are slim. One can’t imagine Pedro Pascal signing up to be Reed Richards for a decade, for example. So it’s time to decide now; are the Marvel characters of the future going to be Ms. Marvel and Shang-Chi? Are they people we have yet to meet like Wonder Man? Someone from left field such as Legion or Beta Ray Bill?
These are the last miles for the Marvel convoy to coast through before they have to start climbing uphill again. At the end of it, they will have needed to have sold more, less familiar, Marvel characters to a broad audience. Let’s hope that Disney succeeds this time where it has failed over the last few years, twice.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
