Can Marvel survive its current struggles? Probably, but the situation is stressful enough that it reportedly has Kevin Feige sweating. A new report from Variety gives some insight into how Marvel Studios has reacted to the diminishing critical and commercial success of the latest output, characterizing a recent annual company retreat as “angst-ridden.”
If you’ve been paying attention to Marvel’s behind-the-scenes at all, the list of problems won’t come as a surprise. The major points are as follows:
Basing an entire Avengers “saga” around a character played by Jonathan Majors
Marvel may be keeping quiet over Jonathan Majors’ domestic violence legal battle, but it’s obviously throwing the whole 10-year plan into chaos. According to Variety, Disney execs were already side-eyeing the character after Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania underperformed, but that didn’t stop them from fully committing, and apparently the Loki second season finale sets up the whole “Kang Dynasty” storyline for the films. Allegedly, there’s been conversation of pivoting to another villain like Doctor Doom instead; recasting Kang the Conqueror is another option.
Convoluted interconnected plots
At this stage of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, every new movie requires multiple movies and television series worth of lore to understand what’s going on, which is clearly taxing the audience’s attention. This problem apparently came into play with the upcoming The Marvels, which “resulted in four weeks of reshoots to bring coherence to a tangled storyline,” per Variety, and director Nia DaCosta allegedly started working on a whole other movie during The Marvels’ post-production.
The constant churn
A related problem is that post-Endgame MCU has favored quantity over quality, and fans and critics alike have taken notice. This is most evident in the VFX sphere, as when audiences were puzzled by what looked like half-finished graphics in Quantumania. That was partially due to Ant-Man and The Marvels swapping release dates, radically altering Ant-Man’s production timeline. But relying on overworked, underpaid VFX artists is enough of a recurring issue that those workers recently voted to unionize.
Not to mention, the strategy is a total money pit—Variety reports that “a single episode of She-Hulk [cost] some $25 million, dwarfing the budget of a final-season episode of HBO’s Game Of Thrones, ” and She-Hulk obviously did not have anywhere near the cultural impact of Game Of Thrones.
Diminishing star power
Finally, the fact of the matter is that Marvel isn’t casting or creating stars like it used to. Quality of the films aside, none of the second-gen Marvel stars (e.g. Simu Liu or any of the Eternals) have really launched to stardom like the first generation did. This issue is bad enough that apparently the Marvel brass have actually discussed bringing back deceased characters like Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.). It seems an unlikely scenario, not just because those people would have to agree to do it but because they’d be very expensive if they did.
The solution may indeed be to invest in and revive characters that are already popular and beloved by audiences, and Variety says Kevin Feige is working on incorporating the X-Men into the greater MCU. But Blade starring Mahershala Ali has been in the works for a long while now and has endured a lot of trouble behind the scenes. Ali apparently had issues with where the script was going, and a source told Variety “the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons” in which “Blade was relegated to the fourth lead.” Apparently, Logan scribe Michael Green has been brought on board and the plan is to make a relatively low-budget $100 million version of the film.