QUESTION ASKED: Is Marvel dying?

Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. “The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,” he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some theaters, eager to fill the demand, screened the film over and over for seventy-two straight hours.

Now everything’s coming up Scorsese. The Marvel strongmen have fallen from the sky and landed, cape-first, onto concrete. Last year’s The Marvels, a group outing of female superheroes, made a profit of only $47 million on its $200 million budget — the lowest box-office takeaway of any Marvel film. The film blog Deadline blames Disney+ streaming services. In its on-demand delivery of superhero “content,” it does away with most of the magic of going to the movies. Fair enough. But there are other dimensions to the decline.

I survey friends who like superhero films, only to find they’ve all gone off Marvel films. One says she hasn’t seen a Marvel film in nearly six years because the plots are too complicated. All of the heroes operate in the same universe: you have to have watched every Marvel release of the last decade to understand whatever they put out next. Another used to watch the films regularly but found that the different fight scenes started to merge into each other. Some pin the decline to the birth of Disney+ and others to the release of Endgame, which killed off several of the franchise’s most recognizable characters. “Too many movies and shows to keep track of,” explains another ex-fan.

In his new book Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV, veteran Hollywood journalist Peter Biskind writes:

WandaVision is full of echoes, allusions, callbacks, and Easter eggs from old TV sitcoms and previous Marvel shows, creating a puzzle for superfans by entangling them in the increasingly intricate Marvel maze, all of which is fine. But when Black Widow was released, requiring The Washington Post to run a piece entitled, “The 7 Marvel Movies You Should See Before Black Widow,” the danger is that those who merely want to watch, not research a PhD in MCU studies, are left out in the cold. Ditto Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For those studying for their MCU exams, The New York Times recommended rewatching five films to fully understand it.

The current incarnation of Hollywood began with George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977. It’s opening crawl began with the words, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” which alerted moviegoers they needn’t know anything about the backstories of the characters they were about to watch for the first time to enjoy the movie. Comic book-based Hollywood would be wise to recapture that ethos.