I remember being baffled while on the phone with my friend:
“You really need to see Quantumania. Ignore the reviews. It’s a blast.”
“But people seem to hate it!”
“Ignore them. Trust me.”
And he was right. Not only is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania a lot of fun, I can think of quite a few, far more beloved, Marvel films that I think considerably less of.
What is going on?
It wasn’t too long after that when a sense of unease about the upcoming release of The Marvels (2023) began to creep into the public zeitgeist and that truly delightful film took an even worse box office dive than its predecessor.
The seemingly bulletproof Marvel franchise was suddenly taking wounds.
Why?
A lot of theories got floated and each might hold a grain of truth:
All of these are certainly relevant to the MCU’s box office, but I think that the answer to the question of why the MCU’s fortunes seem to be turning might be a much simpler one, one which the Marvel Comics company — the company that makes, you know, the comics — learned to avoid many decades ago: the Marvel Cinematic Universe gave its fans an off-ramp.
The MCU has more films in its canon than any other English-language film series (having passed Britain’s Carry On comedy series a few years ago). It has fairly relentlessly continued to put out films since 2008’s Iron Man first hit the big screen. Likewise, Marvel Comics has published comic books non-stop since 1939, creating and continually manipulating the legacies of hundreds of popular characters, including those currently featured in the MCU. While the comic company will never be as financially successful as the film wing of the “House of Ideas,” it learned something about the nature of audiences that it, evidently, never thought to teach its cinematic younger sibling.
In the early ’80s, Marvel, whose fortunes had been up and down for a very long time, had a hit on its hands with Chris Claremont’s X-Men books which had leapt out of the nerdy shadows and into the mainstream. Claremont’s run, arguably, peaked with The Dark Phoenix Saga (1981). Chronicling the explosive rise in power and eventual corruption of one of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s oldest characters, Marvel Girl a.k.a. Phoenix, the story was the biggest sales hit the company had ever seen, and thus began the age of the modern “Event Comic.”
By 1984’s Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars the company had dipped its toe into the idea of the event reaching into the narrative through-lines of other popular comics to show that there would be distinct and long-term implications of the Event for the involved heroes’ titles (most famously the return to Earth of Spider-Man with a new, seemingly sentient, black suit, later to be revealed as the character Venom). If Secret Wars was a toe-dip, Secret Wars II (1985) was a full-on belly-flop into the idea of a crossover event. It’s an absolute mess of chaotic and contradictory storylines from over twenty separate comic titles, but now the genie was out of the bottle. The reader’s dedication to the Event was going to, from here on, be measured by how many titles they were willing to purchase to explore the big story’s impact on every nook and cranny of the Marvel universe.
By 1991’s Infinity Gauntlet event (notably the story which forms the basis of the MCU event films Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019)) it had become common for Marvel to produce two to three large-scale event storylines every year with up to fifty crossover issues from long-running titles linked in. The plots of these events couldn’t help but bump into each other, but rather than trying to avoid these collisions Marvel began embracing them with one event cascading into another (semi)deliberately: Avengers Disassembled (2004), for example, leads into House of M (2005) which leads into Decimation (2006) — and if you wanted to read every book that in some way touched those three-event series, you would’ve purchased 151 individual comic books in those three years.
This all becomes unbelievably dense in the mid-2000s — the comics era by far most mined as source material for the MCU. In 2006, Annihilation starts for the Marvel “Cosmic” books (think Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)), Planet Hulk starts for the, well, Hulk (think Thor:Ragnarok (2017)) and the Civil War Event starts on Earth (think Captain America: Civil War (2016)).
Within a year, even the X-Men get back in on the act with SIX X-Events in two years!
These events dovetail, spawn new series and new superhero teams, re-shuffle the company’s mythology, and form a rich, but exhausting, narrative tapestry.
And they never. ever. stop. The stories intentionally keep you on the hook — on several hooks, really — forever. Civil War ends with the assassination of a major character and with several splinter-group Avengers (New Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Dark Avengers, Avengers: The Initiative), all with their own brand new titles, all still in play… and then, before you can take a breath, The Hulk declares war on the….um, world.
Major event after major event, no exit ramp. The audience keeps reading because, like a soap opera, new questions are continually opened, characters are left in jeopardy and the stories are, on the whole, pretty good.
And this is the mistake that Marvel Comics’ younger sibling, the MCU, has made. Avengers: Endgame offered a stopping point. Without the continual churn of story, MCU fans were seemingly expected to take a quick nap and be right back for the beginning of the second set of twenty-plus films. The problem was that said audience, instead, took that moment to reflect, perhaps considering what they’d like to do with the next decade of their lives and they decided that they had finished their nice long Marvel story that ended with Thanos being defeated and that they weren’t ready to make that commitment — a commitment that they probably weren’t even aware that they were making in in 2008 — again; at least not just yet.
Marvel Studios let people get off the ride and think about whether they wanted to get back on. And it had been a very long ride.
How, then, to account for the MCU films after Endgame that performed well?
They are the exceptions that prove the rule. It is difficult to judge the box office success of a film released during the height of the COVID pandemic so it wouldn’t be fair to discuss the box office performances of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) or Eternals (2021) — though if we did, they both would’ve performed worse that Quantumania — but it seems clear that the box office was back by December of 2021 for Spider-Man: No Way Home, the second highest grossing film in the entire run of the MCU thus far.
So, if Marvel took their eye off the ball and let people walk away at the end of the Thanos story, why did Spider-Man, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (2023) do so well?
Because they all looked backwards. They closed out pre-Endgame threads. They were like continuing to read the New Avengers comics after Civil War had ended.
Spider-Man — Closed out a trilogy of “Home” movies and earlier, alternate, popular renditions of the main character as well.
Doctor Strange — Closed out the streaming series WandaVision as well as teasing an even further back reference to the original Fox X-Men movies.
Thor — A sequel to the same director’s popular Thor: Ragnarok (2017).
Black Panther — Closed out the titular character’s story entirely.
Guardians — Well, that one’s pretty obvious.
And the under-performers? If we cut some slack to Shang-Chi and Eternals (which did under-perform and are also forward-facing, not back), then we are left with two films acting like they’re trying to launch the franchise into the next decade.
Ant-Man and the Wasp — This is the literal big-screen beginning of the MCU’s next event, featuring Kang the Conqueror. (Kang made his first actual MCU appearance in season one of Loki on Disney+.) Let’s face it, Ant-Man is a likable, but not hugely iconic character in the way we see Captain America or Iron Man. He was not going to, on his own, be enough of a pull to start the franchise’s new narrative conceit. This might be a different discussion if this had been a “Black Panther Meets Kang” film (and wouldn’t that have been great?!), but audiences needed to be coaxed into diving into the MCU’s new swimming pool and Ant-Man couldn’t convince them that it wouldn’t be cold.
The Marvels — The formation of the first new superhero team since the dissolution of the Avengers feels very much like a reshaping of the MCU that the audience had become familiar with. In fact, if you stick through the credits (slight spoiler) the movie gestures towards forming TWO new superhero teams, The Marvels and The Young Avengers. Even more than Quantumania this feels like Kevin Feige holding up a banner as if to say, “This is who we are now!”
These films are not just popcorn movies, they feel like a large cultural commitment. They are the beginnings of the next decade of Marvel movies.
This phenomenon is not at all the same thing that is meant by “superhero fatigue.” What is happening here has to do with the audience’s tolerance for any film series this long and intertwined, not just comic book movies. Interest can be maintained, but the company making the films has to commit to either never giving the audience a chance to look away or to having periodic long-term breaks in order to rest, reset, and refresh the audience’s appetite for the world it’s creating.
Disney and Marvel are now going to have to take a look at where they stand with their audience and decide how to move forward. They are making good films, but rebuilding to the fever pitch the company was at prior to the conclusion of the Thanos story is going to take some thoughtful moves.
The stories of the MCU’s impending demise are huge exaggerations. This is the most-watched film series of all time. Some of the individual titles are among the most viewed single films of all time. This franchise is lucrative in the extreme.
No film studio has ever even attempted, much less succeeded, at anything of the scope of what the MCU has achieved over the past fifteen years. It is entirely uncharted territory for a film series to try to carry that much water for that long.
It’s not uncharted for a comic book company, though.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
