Why The Marvel Cinematic Universe is Collapsing

The time of the marvel cinematic universe is coming to an end. The golden age. Yeah, that’s over. From last year’s flop after flop to the latest failure Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, it is needless to say that Marvel is in deep trouble. One year (2022) of bad productions has buckled the knees of the biggest franchise in cinema history. Fans have snubbed nearly all the movies since Endgame and they have a good reason. There are a lot of obvious factors in play here but that’s been talked about a lot. There’s more to be taken away from the failings of the MCU. And that’s what I want to uncover in this article.

Now, Die-hard Marvel nerds might lurk with their defense at ready like every MCU movie open to number one, they are still the biggest movies of the year, phase four was just a setup phase, etc. These words sound like a PR spin straight from Disney itself and we should just block that crap out of us because make no mistake about it. 2022 was an absolutely horrible time for Marvel and DC.

As far as the MCU is concerned. I’m not saying it’s going to end in the next year or even five years. But we are in the endgame now that’s for sure! Does the MCU make up every comic book production? Well, no, of course not, but the MCU was so influential. So massive, that the comic book movie genre as a whole will go where the MCU goes. Whatever happens to this particular franchise will influence how studios approach adaptations of comic books for better or worse. Hollywood is no stranger to trends and the MCU’s success was the reason why studios were desperate to build their own cinematic universe over the past decade. And let us laugh at some outstanding failures. For every success, there were multiple disasters. From the mild success of Godzilla’s monster verse to the scrapping of Universal’s Dark Universe after Tom Cruise’s version of the mummy completely bombed.

I’m serious. Let’s break down how Marvel’s phase four has ruined the entire brand.

Phase 4 doomed Marvel

At the start of 2021, the MCU was still riding high. Nothing had come out since Endgame and Spider-Man’s second MCU movie. So people were still excited to see what was coming next. End game was the combination of over 10 years of filmmaking. The conclusion of an experiment involving interconnected franchises to form one overarching narrative. Truly unprecedented that the MCU had been rewarded with some of the biggest moneymakers in box office history. Even without Tony Stark or Captain America in the mix anymore there appeared to be great characters to take the passing of the torch for the lead of the MCU. We still had Thor who is seeing a Renaissance of popularity with three straight well-received iterations of the character. We also had Dr. Strange who when paired up with Tony Stark in Infinity War proved he could go toe to toe in a battle with Iron Man showing the audience who our next charismatic leader could be. And we of course had Spider-Man who recently resigned for future MCU movies at the end of 2019.

As long as we have our anchor characters ones that are central to the central narrative, it’s okay If there are some misses, right? Well, 2021 put that right to the test as phase four started with TV shows on Disney Plus receiving a collective Meh! from audiences, the MCU is about the movies and we all know that.

Well, the actual cinematic part of phase four had a rough start, to put it mildly with black widow tanking at the box office pulling in just 390 million and Shang-Chi crashing and finishing at just over 400 million. And then the Eternals, which cracked 400 million and was a complete bomb at the domestic box office. As well was a disaster reception-wise with critics and fans bashing it all too.

These aren’t just underperforming numbers. These are nightmare figures for movies that cost 200 million to make and almost as much to market. But at the time, people were still giving things a pass. It’s a new era of film. Post-2020 streaming is causing low box office. People still don’t want to go to the movies.

Eternals was just a dud. That doesn’t mean everything else will be. Yeah, those things played a role, but more importantly, audiences found these movies to be mid to horrible a fact. People were gleefully ignoring it after all. The MCU always had some very big wins like the original Ironman Avengers, Civil War, and Infinity War. But they were also surrounded by mids to lows, like Antman, Ironman 2, and Thor: The Dark World.

That seemed to be the case again. Once Spider-Man Noway Home came out, which made almost $2 billion without seeing any box office from China, and at the time was universally acclaimed. So all right MCU is still on track. Next up is Dr. Strange 2. Strange is clearly the centerpiece of the MCU now. This will be a guaranteed success, right? NO! Dr. Strange couldn’t saved the MCU either.

Okay, okay. Well, there is Thor Love and Thunder at least. Right? People loved Ragnarok. Plus Thor is badass. Surprise! surprise! Thor Love and Thunder is panned by both critic and audiences globally.

And that’s the way it went. If the awfulness of Thor Love and Thunder didn’t seal the deal, She-Hulk sure did. Black Widow, Eternals those weren’t random misses. Nope. They were actually a sign of things to come. As we know Spider-Man is Sony’s property for better or worse, No Way Home feels far removed from the rest of the slate. Just completely different.

It seems phase four was ultimately considered a massive failure. Let’s look at reality here. Every single Marvel film of 2021 and 2022 made less than a billion dollars and some made less than half that. Meanwhile, pre-phase four, you had crap films like Captain Marvel making over a billion. Dr. Strange 2 was the closest one to a billion, but negative word of mouth pulled that down and Thor 4 never even came close.

The final nail in the coffin was the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever which just as I predicted, did not hit the billion dollar mark either. How did this happen? A few things. Phase four was a restart of MCU storyline after the Endgame. So they were introducing new characters.

There was a massive disruption in the real world during covid that changed the movie-going experience, but these excuses could be countered with phase four which had all the goodwill from Endgame backing it up along with anchor characters like Dr. Strange, Spider-Man and Thor. No Way Home making nearly $2 billion proved even after post-covid people will see a movie if they like it.

This leads me to conclude people did not and do not connect with these movies. They are not good. And why aren’t they good? How’d we get from the highs of the Avengers films to witness the beginning of the end for the biggest franchise in cinema history? Well, it’d be useful to first take a look at the past to see how we got here.

To identify what made these movies popular in the first place. Comic book movies had been around since the seventies with the success of Richard Donner’s Superman, in 1989 Batman, and a few low-budget comic book adaptations came out in that span but didn’t see close to the same success.

The Batman franchise started large and ended with a Dissapointment. Batman and Robin in 1997 was a critical and commercial disaster and derailed the franchise for years to come. A few years later, Fox released the first X-Men movie in the summer of 2000 and this marked a turn for the comic book movie genre.

After the movie proved to be a moneymaker, this enticed other studios to try their hands as Marvel in the 90s filed bankruptcy and sold the film rights to various studios. Sony stepped up to the plate in 2002 with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and it’s crazy to think now but there was a time when movies didn’t open to over a hundred million dollars. Spider-Man was the first film to ever cross that mark in its opening weekend with $114 million and end this run at the time as the fifth biggest movie in history.

This was a perfect start for superhero movie genre.

In July 2008, The Dark Night set the benchmark for superhero movies, but just a few months earlier in May of that year, Robert Downey Jr. And Ironman came out of nowhere. Marvel retained the rights to its core Avengers group and had managed to secure financing for its own movie studio and made a huge gamble on the production of Ironman. A well-known hero in comic book circles, but not a household name by any stretch, and the gamble paid off with massive commercial and critical success.

From here on out, there were two styles of superhero films set by two groundbreakers. The dark gritty style of the dark knight, and the lighter more self-aware tone of Ironman and what would quickly become known as the MCU. After its success, Disney quickly grabbed the opportunity and buyout Marvel for few billion dollars.

After Ironman in an origin for Captain America, Hulk, and Thor out of the way, the stage was set for world domination with the Avengers.

The success both with fans, critics, and insane box office numbers solidified the MCU as an absolute game changer. Seeing all of these heroes together for the first time was a novelty, and it didn’t hurt that the movie was well-written.

What MCU done right that time?

The original Ironman movie was a big success in its own right, but the box Office of Captain America, Thor, and Incredible Hulk ranged from disappointing to acceptable, which is no fault of theirs. Well, maybe Hulk because like Ironman pre-2008, Thor and Cap were not household names.

Geeks can say whatever they want about how popular they were, but believe me, they weren’t. It’s when they all came together in 2012 with the Avengers that for the first time ever we saw superheroes from separate franchises interact. The idea of a cinematic universe seemed crazy at the time, but they somehow pulled it off by giving the fans what they deserved. Seeing the characters play off each other, their personalities clash, and I still remember the first time seeing Hulk try to pick up Thor’s hammer and it was absolutely surreal. The whole concept was fresh, new, and exciting. It’s what set the stage for box office dominance for years to come. And what else made it work? How about the fact that they had a plan? Yes. Prior to Ironman’s release, the goal and scope for Marvel’s new production studio were to introduce their core heroes, culminating in an Avengers film.

The Infinity Saga hadn’t been conceptualized yet, but from the get-go, they had a goal. This was all dependent on the success of Ironman, but they were setting it up from the get-go. Once the Avengers opened in 2012 and Moviegoers saw Thanos, it was clear there was an overarching story in mind.

Three phases of films leading up to a confrontation with Thanos and a battle for the Infinity Stones. The MCU is also blessed with likable and charismatic actors taking up the mantles of their heroes. When you combine Pitch Perfect casting with character-driven writing and happen to be building a long-form narrative spanning multiple movies, you have yourself a recipe for keeping audiences invested in your characters.

Robert Downey, Jr.

Well, what can you say about him that hasn’t been said a trillion times? He was Tony Stark and Chris Evans as Captain America as the centerpiece of the MCU. I think we might have taken them for granted because they’re most certainly missed now. Chadwick Bozeman was fantastic casting as Black Panther and even though her solo movie was mid at best, we still love you, Scar Joe. You’ll always be our black widow. These great actors were playing great characters. It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when Ironman and Captain America weren’t A-list superheroes, and that’s just how it was before the MCU. But solid character-driven writing with great actors lets people see what all the comic book nerds knew for decades.

But one thing that was almost universally agreed on was that the films failed to build up their villains as much as they did their heroes. For better or worse. That’s definitely what happened. The MCU was more focused on its protagonist than anything else. But it worked, with just a couple of well-developed villains and Loki and Thanos through the first three phases the MCU made their previously B-list heroes household names by focusing on them. And I’ve made an entire article about this guy, but it’s worth repeating that Robert Downey Jr. was a key to the MCU's success. Marvel caught lightning in a bottle with RDJ as Tony Stark and made sure to milk that for everything It was.

Having him appear on the big screen 9 out of the 11 years it took to get through phase three, including 5 straight years from 2015 to 2019. The MCU expanded in that time from the earthbound heroes all the way to other galaxies. But Marvel was smart enough to always somehow have it come back to Stark or involve him in some capacity including the final battle in Endgame where out of all heroes participating in the fight, it was Tony who made the ultimate sacrifice in defeating Thanos.

Narratively, it keeps things grounded by having a lead figure in an ever-expanding universe. So with all this perfected marketing world, building, and planning, once phase three ended and it was time to move on from our lead heroes, the foundation was already there and everything was going to be fine, right?

We had Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, Thor, and Black Panther. Perfect to lead us into the next era of the MCU and the impending arrival of the X-Men and Fantastic Four.

End Game felt like the finale of a story, but what could possibly happen in the next chapter was just as tantalizing. So what did they do? Well? In one calendar year, Disney managed to do a complete 180 and do the exact opposite of what got them there in the first place.

Novelty is gone

One thing they simply cannot help is that the Novelty’s gone. There’s nothing you can do about that. We’ve seen superheroes joining forces on screen a number of times now and the universe has expanded so much. It’s expected that people will guest star or cross in and out of other sub-franchisees.

With phase four, it felt completely and utterly directionless. There were different movies and shows handling multiverse scenarios, but it seemed like every project was operating independently of one another with zero continuity we’ve come to expect from the MCU to create contradictions and confusion with how things are supposed to work. The MCU has never been shy about retconning certain things to fit the current place and the narrative but with the passive introduction of Kang in the Loki show and then the eventual naming of him as the main bad guy earlier in 2022. It’s clear they were pressing the panic button after complaints about a rudderless ship the MCU had become. It was after Thor Love and Thunder arrived to abysmal reviews and reception from fans that Kevin Feige announced the weekend getaway with the creatives at Marvel Studios in order to plan out the next 10 years of the MCU.

Disney has also been hiring some mid-level actors to replace their previously pitch-perfect cast. It’s most likely a mixture of acting and bad writing. Simu Liu as Shang-Chis was okay, and don’t even get me started with a completely miscast ensemble of the Eternals.

They even managed to make Angelina Jolie cringe-inducing. These actors aren’t bad at their job rather the characters they’re playing are typically boring.

Yes, these characters are also in the comic books, but there’s a reason their comics get canceled a few times. Because they’re just not very beloved. These characters mostly exist to expand diversity, which is a noble goal for sure. But unfortunately, they forgot to craft anything interesting about them other than establishing their race or gender.

Want Ironman? Well, he’s out. So how about Girl Ironman? Want Captain America? Well, how about we take an established black hero Falcon and give him caps? Want Hulk? What about She-Hulk? How about Second Black Widow? MCU already have beloved characters with charismatic actors to lead the way. But instead, Strange has been relegated to a bystander in his own film. Thor has been turned into a complete joke and Spider-Man; well, his movie rights are owned by Sony. So that’s a tough one to diminish. But with Strange in particular, they completely sidestep the idea of having a central character for the overarching narrative as they had with Ironman in phase one through three, which is just maddening, Strange is ideally suited for this role because of his power set and ability to handle and travel the multiverse.

But he was essentially relegated to a supporting role in his own movie and seems to be playing that role wherever he goes. It worked great in Spider-Man No Way Home but in his own movie, It’s pity.

At the end of 2019, the MCU was an absolute juggernaut. The likes of which had never been seen at the box office and what they’ve produced post-2019 tell the story of an arrogant studio that thinking they were too big to fail that day could completely change what had gotten them there, and the fans would follow them anyway.

Perfect pump out MCU adjacent TV shows to draw people in as long as you’re okay with diluting the product of its specialness and finally experiencing the superhero fatigue people have been anticipating for years. I remember 2016 through 2019 is an insane time for superhero movies and oversaturation crossed my mind, but the films were proving every naysayer wrong.

Then 2022 showed up and said, hold my beer. Since Marvel is owned by Disney and since the film industry follows trends, Marvel did the trendy thing and blamed fans for disliking absolute garbage like Dr. Strange 2, Eternals, and Thor 4.

If anyone tells you the MCU has gone off the rails because of ideology, I can assure you there are a lot more reasons than that. So where do we go from here?

The ship is sinking

We already saw Marvel pressing the panic button by convincing Hugh Jackman to come back as Wolverine one last time in Deadpool three.

There are rumors that Marvel can’t introduce the X-Men or Fantastic Four until the cast from the Fox Films contracts run out in 2026. Otherwise, they have to bring those actors back as the characters until then, so it makes sense why they haven’t introduced the MCU version of the X-Men yet.

But I question if Marvel is even excited about bringing in this giant cast of beloved and anticipated characters. I mean, personally, I’m not looking forward to a boring and neutered wolverine in secret. But the inevitable arrival of the X-Men and Fantastic four means the MCU will endure at least another decade.

That’s why this is the start of the sinking ship, the slow drip of death. But the time of the comic book movie will someday come to an end, especially if those two properties are botched. And I dare say that the heyday for this genre is already over.