Marvel’s Kevin Feige has a plan to combat superhero fatigue. Will it work?
Even Marvel president Kevin Feige knows there's too much superhero "content," so he's looking to change the rate of the studio's film and television releases
Aux Features Kevin Feige
Has superhero fatigue hit you yet? It’s a real phenomenon, at least according to a recent study from the fan platform Fandom (via Variety), which reported that 36% of Marvel fans are feeling burnt out by the number of releases from the studio. (The same is true for only 20% of DC fans, but then, they’re not being fed nearly as well.) With Disney+ ramping up the MCU’s television output, the franchise may be feeling oversaturated for some viewers. And Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige is well aware of that fact.
“I do think one of the powerful aspects of being at Marvel Studios is having these films and shows hit the zeitgeist. It is harder to hit the zeitgeist when there’s so much product out there—and so much ‘content,’ as they say, which is a word that I hate,” Feige says in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly about the studio’s future. He references a recent Saturday Night Live sketch about the overwhelming amount of entertainment options currently available to illustrate his point.
“But we want Marvel Studios and the MCU projects to really stand out and stand above,” Feige continues. “So, people will see that as we get further into Phase 5 and 6. The pace at which we’re putting out the Disney+ shows will change so they can each get a chance to shine.” Asked if that means spacing things out or putting out fewer shows a year, the Marvel mastermind replies, “Both, I think.”
DC is not Marvel’s only issue
This may come as some relief to fans who feel, like Feige, that the impact of Marvel’s storytelling is being diluted by excess “content.” But now that DC also has an ambitious slate of projects for the next few years, will it even matter that Marvel is dialing back? Though the franchises are separate, they obviously share a lot of similarities. And now the head of DC Studios is a Marvel veteran, so the films might end up sharing sensibilities, too. (James Gunn’s opinion on superhero fatigue, for the record, is that it can be combated through good storytelling. “You have to make the stories diverse and different. Good guy, bad guy, giant thing in the sky, good guys win—you can’t tell that story again,” he told the New York Times. “You need to tell stories that are more, you know, morally complex.”)
Yet Marvel’s issues with superhero fatigue might run deeper than a competitive market. Reviews are mixed for Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania, the first film in Marvel’s “Phase 5.” While plenty of critics have positive things to say about the film—the character’s third solo outing, and the 31st in the franchise overall—others have highlighted a specifically Marvel issue, which is the Marvel machine itself.
“The problem with Quantumania is that it’s not a movie, it’s a building block,” writes Inverse’s Hoai-Tran Bui. “Marvel movies have long become less like movies and more like feature-length commercials for the next thing, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is sadly the greatest embodiment of that.” Kristy Puchko of Mashable agrees, “[It’s] barely a movie, pulling threads together for a grander scheme of merchandizing and cross-promotion over character-based storytelling.” Opines Courtney Howard for FreshFiction.tv, “When the first end credit tag holds more weight, potential, and thrills than the entire two hours that came before it, there’s a massive problem.”
Holding fans hostage
Part of the problem is: How does one combat superhero fatigue if every project is designed specifically to get audiences excited about the next project? The studio’s bread and butter since the Iron Man sequels has been introducing characters who would go on to become major players, teasing team-ups and tantalizing them with Easter eggs. The MCU pioneered the post-credits scene, holding fans hostage in their seats to see what comes next. From those successes sprung franchise “Phases,” which are just chapters within the overarching “Sagas.”
And every film or show within a phase within a saga is inextricably linked to the next. “[We] don’t ever want it to seem exclusive or that you need to have done your homework before watching something,” Feige tells EW. Yet the plot of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness was dependent on having seen WandaVision, and the Loki series served as a clever smokescreen to introduce Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), the new Big Bad introduced in Quantumania. Fans who want to see storylines satisfyingly finished will find themselves following those plot threads endlessly because the stories are designed purposefully not to conclude.
There’s always been a question as to whether fans will keep showing up now that their beloved original Avengers are (mostly) out of the picture. Making a Marvel project more of a rare commodity may stave off the fatigue, though some fans may still get tired of the MCU’s own neverending story. We’ll have to wait and see whether Phase 5 has enough juice to keep people energized.
209 Comments
Classic killing of the golden goose.Not sure who is doing it more thoroughly, Marvel or Star Wars.
I am not a Star Wars guy, but Andor is a major course correction. Disney’s Star Wars properties have mostly been pablum (not surprising given they’re for kids), but Andor actually delivered a tightly structured story that deals with the societal implications of space Nazis.
Don’t expect more of that.
They’re doing a second season of that.
You know what I fucking mean.
Andor may be more of a one-off fluke than a course correction. But hopefully they take some good lessons from its critical success.
Andor is not good. Like Last of Us it benefits from a baby brained audience that have spent their entire lives only watching children’s entertainment.
lol no
At least with Star Wars they were smart enough to pause the films for a few years while they figure out a new direction. The MCU appears to be an unstoppable machine that will run till it collapses.
Yeah, but that “pause” was in the wake of the disastrously awful (and financially under-performing, at least for a Star Wars movie) The Rise of Skywalker. The MCU hasn’t had any low spots like that any time recently; despite the general mediocrity of the Phase 4 movies, they were on average better received critically than TROS and did good to great in terms of box office. Not to mention that if one of them was weak, there was another one coming in a few months, whereas there was nothing on the horizon after TROS.This isn’t to say that you’re entirely wrong; the MCU might just keep lumbering forward, slowly losing its edge, until something really bad happens (a hugely panned flop) and the Marvel/Disney execs panic. Although given that Disney has a lot of experience ensuring that its movies are at least tolerably good and make a good amount of money, my guess is that we’re more likely to end up with the MCU becoming a factory of movies that aren’t interesting or fun enough to overcome the fact that they’re Corporate Product™.My perspective is that the MCU’s generally consistent quality is because of Feige, and he’s overextended now that there’s so many movies and TV shows. I don’t have trouble keeping up with them, but I think he does, and much of Phase 4 suffered because of it. (The pandemic didn’t help either.)
Point taken, but even a well cared for goose eventually dies of old age. That the MCU had been relevant and successful for 15 years is an amazing feat. I think we’re reaching a point where no matter action the studio takes, the patient is going to flatline.
You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Phase 14 is going to be so epic.
If killing meaning constantly making huge money-making hits, sure.
i think Star Wars by miles, although Andor was quite good
See I don’t know if it is right to call it “superhero fatigue”. It’s just this last year or so we’ve seen some meh content. She-Hulk was awful, Ms. Marvel was meh.I think the second season of Loki is out this summer, so that will be good.
Yet the plot of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness was dependent on having seen WandaVision, Was it? It seemed to me that the relevant information was presented in the movie, itself. Sure, you get a deeper understanding of what’s going on with Wanda, but on don’t think it’s strictly necessary to have seen the show.
I don’t think any Marvel movie has really been dependent on you having seen another one, with the exception of End Game. It’s not like they’re so deep that you need the context of another one to get it.I remember seeing The Empire Strikes Back before A New Hope when I was a kid. I wasn’t confused. I just wanted to see the first one.
I mean, most of the Phase 1 non-sequels are required viewing.
Required for what? Are you really not going to understand Avengers if you haven’t seen Thor?
i would say thor is probably the one movie you need to watch before avengers, considering how much of loki’s motivation comes from it.
Loki’s the bad guy. How much motivation do you really need to know about? Do you need a whole other movie to know why Goldfinger wants to rob Fort Knox? Why Darth Vader wants to blow up Alderaan? Why Hans Gruber is robbing a skyscraper? You definitely don’t.
Nope. Loki is the main bad guy and you’d have no idea who he was. Nor Thor.
They literally tell you who both of them are.
They really aren’t. I didn’t see Thor or Captain America before going to see The Avengers, and it isn’t like it’s hard to follow. It’s like if you go see a movie, and the lead character goes home at one point to his wife. Yeah, there’s definitely backstory as to how and when they met and got married, but it isn’t a problem to just accept it at face value.
It’s like people forget that these are very shallow children’s movies.
The latest Spider-Man felt like I needed to watch 7 other movies to get most of it…so I think you are wrong. It’s why “into the Spider-Verse” was great, and the latest live action was pretty shitty.
What is there to get? There are alternate universes and other Spider-Men live in them. Does not knowing 2-3 movies of backstory about them make the current movie unintelligible? No, but if you’ve seen those other movies you may understand a few references. Are those references required to understand the plot of the current movie? No.
Uh, the movie was filled with dozens of references and “jokes” that anyone who wasn’t up to speed wouldn’t get. So does it stop me from getting the plot? No. Does it make me look confused every 5 minutes with another thing that may be a joke but I don’t get again because I didn’t watch Andrew Garfield’s second movie?It was a shit movie. Especially since it was done already so much better with the same character.
Spiderverse probably had allusions you didn’t get either. I’ve never seen the Garfield Spider-Mans. It seriously doesn’t matter if you don’t get every single reference.
You got more out of it if you saw WandaVision, but it was actually much more crucial to see Endgame first. You could say that about all of Phase 4, actually. You had to see Infinity War and Endgame, or at least be fairly fluent on what happened.
it may not literally be true, but it certainly felt like that to most people. it might not be a problem if you’re completely unaware a tv show exists, but i imagine there was a gnawing ‘there’s more information here i should know’.like when you’d read a comic and it would go ‘Ed Note – read issue #43’…sure, you could still read the comic and it would make sense on its own terms, but it was still annoying.
“it may not literally be true, but it certainly felt like that to most people.”
Source?
Yeah this is basically how I feel. The last MCU movie I saw was maybe Black Panther, and that was because my wife wanted to see it. And maybe it’s just me, but if I’m especially motivated to see Doctor Strange or whatever, it definitely feels like I won’t FULLY enjoy that unless I’ve seen everything between BP and DS, which is, what, a few dozen hours of content? Which isn’t going to happen anytime soon, and so who knows when I’ll get around to Doctor Strange, if ever.
And maybe it’s just me, but if I’m especially motivated to see Doctor
Strange or whatever, it definitely feels like I won’t FULLY enjoy that
unless I’ve seen everything between BP and DS, which is, what, a few dozen hours of content?
I’d say the first Doctor Strange film is fairly self contained and doesn’t really require you to have see any other MCU. There’s a passing reference to Rhodey (who requires surgery following Civil War) and maybe Captain Marvel (well before we actually get her film). Other than that it basically a film about an arrogant jerk who learns to be a better person.Which some folk will see as a retread of first Iron Man. It’s just that this film includes VFX that are similar to Inception and a slightly more humorous tone than the original trailer suggested.
like when you’d read a comic and it would go ‘Ed Note – read issue #43’…sure, you could still read the comic and it would make sense on its own terms, but it was still annoying.Yeah, I feel like non-comics people who watch only some of these movies are finally realizing that this is what reading comics is like, because the characters have been around forever and have done so many things you have to just drop a reference and tell them to go back and read the thing if they’re so interested, but for this specific story it’s not all that relevant. And you’re either into that or you’re not, but that’s just part of reading long running comics. And now that’s also part of watching a cinematic universe.
It totally was, without WandaVision, her last appearance was at the funeral scene in Endgame where she and Hawkeye mourn Black Widow and Vision by the lake at Stark’s funeral. And at that appearance, she seems pretty okay (look I know people can hold it together on the exterior while hurting inside, I’m just saying she seems calm in the moment) and she’s on good terms with every other hero. Then when she shows up in Multiverse of Madness, she’s pulling a full heel turn and talking all about how she wants her kids back and Dr. Strange mentions Westview being a big moment for her. Without the bridge of WandaVision (or having read the House of M comic I guess), you’d be confused as hell. It wouldn’t be that hard to get up to speed and assume “okay I guess she wants kids?” but there would be a major hole in your knowledge.
They explain in the movie “evil book makes you evil”, which is basically all you need to justify it.
Ugh. Sure. That’s “all you need”.Such trash writing on that movie.
Without the bridge of WandaVision (or having read the House of M comic I guess), you’d be confused as hell.On the other hand, I watched WandaVision and the movie was still mostly nonsense.
For me, it’s less of “this only makes sense if you’ve seen a, b, and c,” and more of “this is more gratifying if you have the context from a, b, and c; and will feel incomplete until x, y, and z come out.” At a certain point I started to feel like Lucy in the chocolate factory: one chocolate is a nice treat, but candy becomes a chore when you feel obligated to eat each one and there are even more coming down the conveyor belt.
So i saw marvel movies as they came out. my kid was too young for them. once she got old enough (endgame had been out) I watched them with her.when you binge them IMHO its pretty gratifying. Thor’s first couple of movies by themselves are not that great, but when viewed like an episode of a long series there is less pressure on them to provide and its just fun.dragging all of these movies over the next decade is exhausting. but if i tune out and binge them when I am 60. itll be great.
You can always watch the relevant episodes of Marvel Studios: Legends to get the background of the character, if you aren’t interested in watching an entire series or movie.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Studios:_Legends
For me it’s less “they expect me to have watched the previous ones before this” and more “they expect me to watch the next one after this,” y’know? Like it’s not the fact that I didn’t see Kang introduced in Loki that leaves me cold on Quantamania, it’s that he’s in Quantamania to set him up for Avengers 5 or what-have-you.
Kang shows up on Loki just as it is getting interesting to cold shower the finale with a meandering 30 minute monologue. I don’t even remember what he said. Something like multiverse, timelines, I am a bad guy.You are now caught up.
the overall MCU right now is more standalone than people wanna admit because it ruins their “everything is too interconnected” argument for why superhero fatigue is real and nobody likes these projects anymore
I would argue that watching Wandavision is a prerequisite for *hating* MoM rather than understanding it.I hated what they did to Wanda in the movie. And it’s some of the shittiest MCU writing.
Honestly, I think Dr. Strange 2 might have been more enjoyable if you HADN’T seen Wandavision. In that show, Wanda is a deeply flawed, conflicted antihero who’s terrified of loss and desperate for a life with her husband. In Dr. Strange, she’s a one-dimensional Crazy Magic Lady enacting much more boring version of the Kingpin’s arc from Into the Spider-Verse, and also she seems to have forgotten she even had a husband.What I’m saying is that movie fucked Wanda over hard.
i think if anything the show would lead people to believe Wanda was heading towards a redemption arc rather than a full on heel turn, so perhaps it might have been better for viewers if they had not watched WV
I may be in the minority on this, but I don’t even think it’s a bad thing to have added context from the shows that makes the movies more meaningful. You don’t have to watch everything, absolutely, but when you know that a character is in an upcoming movie you want to see it’s nice that they can flesh out the back story more somewhere else so they don’t have to do so much “table setting” in the movie and can get on with the actual plot sooner.
They’re always gonna be chasing Avengers 4 (Endgame) instead of trying for another Captain America 1 or Iron Man 1. I’ve given everything a pass for the last couple years since Wandavision (a show that started off really fun as it’s own thing, then buckled under the pressure of larger franchise storytelling), waiting for a movie or show that seems to stand on its own merits as a contained story, but it seems there’s just no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
“They’re always gonna be chasing Avengers 4″
This despite the very noticeable fact that they are not trying to do that AT ALL?
That’s why I was legit interested in the Batgirl movie; a ground-level superhero in a homemade costume is EXACTLY what this genre desperately needs more of right now
Ugh, no. Rehashing the same lame origin story nonsense is the LAST thing the genre needs. It needs to move forward, not backward. To iterate and evolve and explore what the idea of a world of superheroes truly means, not just keep rolling back the clock.
Naw. Lumping all “superhero origin stories” into a single shorthand suggests no creativity or inspiration, when we get “origin stories” in other genres all the time with no problem.All that matters is if it’s done well, and a Batgirl film could have been (not saying this one was).
Spectacle matters in these types of movies. Or, at least, it should.I’ve been reading that Ant-Man has really badCGI. This, if true, is becoming a big problem. Bad effects kill spectacle. They might have been able to get away with that crap for a few post-endgame movies just by coasting on goodwill, but at a certain point they need to give these artists the time and resources they need to do their jobs well.
It sounds like these superheros should see a doctor if they are experiencing fatigue. Could be a change in diet could help.
I’d like to see the MCU lean into more stuff like Werewolf By Night. A fun, hour-long romp that barely had any ties to the larger continuity. A lot of these D+ shows leave me feeling simultaneously exhausted and unfulfilled. Finished WBN and was like pretty fun! B+ and it left my brain immediately after.
Werewolf By Night is the only MCU thing I truly loved in years.
One of the things I really enjoyed about She-Hulk was how completely low stakes it was. I was waiting for the series to end with some lame by-the-numbers battle scene, but it instead ended with some funny meta commentary and a complete anti-climax. Not a lot of shows could get away with that, but it was such a nice change of pace.
So low stakes they didn’t even bother finishing up her CGI effects. I know it’s a low hang fruit but any time I see a clip of it I can believe how unnatural She-Hulk looks.
I agree. I didn’t make it all the way through the last Dr. Strange, I found myself simply not caring. I was really engaged by the first third of Wakanda Forever, and then walked away during the climax. Again, I simply didn’t care. It’s all just CGI bombast and I’m tired of everything having to tie in with each other. Werewolf by Night was a perfect tonic for all that bloat.
I say embrace all their IP. Horror, Westerns, Romance. Do it all.
I missed the showing where someone held a fucking gun to my head making me sit through the credits and not get a later description at any one of 148 different sites OR get the clip itself within a few days.
That’s like saying McDonald’s is holding you hostage by asking you if you want extra fries. Fuck off and show some willpower.
As for as saturation, quitcherbitchin
Moon Knight ran six weeks from March 30-May 4
Then you got a month off to carb up, fart, stretch, whatever.
Ms. Marvel ran six weeks from June 8-July 15
Another month to contemplate life, go play outside, fart some more, whatever.Then She-Hulk ran nine weeks (but shorter episodes) from Aug 18-Oct. 13.
And now there’s been nothing except a couple of 45-minute one offs that were interesting or mildly amusing.Are you overtaxed? Did you have to check yourself into the hospital for exhaustion? You going to make it? Want some orange slices?
If they’ve convinced themselves that they can make better stuff by cutting it down from three series a year to two, fair enough. If (as I suspect is the truly what’s going on here) the streaming model isn’t profitable enough to justify three series a year, fair enough.
But pay no attention to the yahoos who say they are too saturated.
Oh, and yes, you got MORE out of Dr. Strange 2 if you watched WandaVision, but it wasn’t necessary.
You care too much about this franchise. Take a deep breath.
No, you do it. You clearly need to after being overtaxed with entertainment options.
I like them leaning into the weird but lean too hard and they’ll get stuck in front of a green screen for the whole flick. Lord of the Ring Snydrome is not great for the actors.
Keep making MORE. I can’t wait for superhero movies to go the way of the western: not fully extinct, but usually the ones that get made are pretty good.
as somebody who loves to hate on this embarrassing garbage for little babies: please don’t stop!
The funny thing about the whole telling diverse and different stories is it seems like Marvel was way better at doing that in the early phases. Like how First Avenger was a WWII movie with a super hero, Winter Soldier was a spy movie with a super hero, Any Man was a heist movie with a super hero and even GOTG was a space opera kind of movie. Now just about everything seems to be super hero first and other thing second.
I think the genre bending aspects of the MCU are a bit exaggerated – Winter Soldier was an action movie from beginning to end – literally from the opening fist fight, car chase, and shootout to the climactic series of explosions.
Agreed. As much as I love CA:TWS, its “70s conspiracy thriller” elements are pretty mild and mostly surface-level. You want a real conspiracy thriller, check out Three Days of the Condor or The Conversation, where the overriding theme is paranoia and uncertainty, and they have downer endings. TWS is an upbeat superhero action movie by comparison.
That said, the scene in The Conversation where Gene Hackman pummels a bunch of guys in an elevator is one for the ages.
“Yet Marvel’s issues with superhero fatigue might” not actually exist?
Spider-Man 3 – 1.9BILIONDr Strange 2 – 955 MillionThor 4 – 761MBlack Panther 2 – 855M
Howzabout we start talking about MCU fatigue when it actually, you know, rears its head? Even once?
I’m probably gonna upset the really hardcore comics nerds around here, but I think one way to stave off some of the superhero fatigue is to do more movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier in between the GotG and Quantumania acid fever dream movies.Y’know, films that are couched in human stakes and drama where the effects and superhero derring-do are frosting on the cake.I know there’s a segment of people who would like nothing better than to see Marvel go ultra-weird and just throw out a Beta Ray Bill movie, or just dig 100% into the most bizarre corners of the canon. But those kinds of movies don’t become blockbusters. Look at Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. That movie was like a Snakes on a Plane for Marvel addicts (and, it should be noted, Sam Raimi addicts). But it flopped commercially because, my god, that movie just got too weird and loopy to really hit with a general audience.To me, that’s the balancing act both Marvel and DC are gonna have to strike if they’re going to keep this train rolling.
That flop made $955 million worldwide.
For some people, “flop” means “it didn’t make more money than a country’s GDP and some people on the internet complained about it”.
Guardians of the Galaxy was a huge blockbuster and is the definition of finding weird canon?? Not to mention most of the complaints for Multiverse of Madness were that they didn’t do enough with the concept…instead we saw like 3 different universes?
i agree with your overall point, but dr strange 2 was their most successful movie last year. it wasn’t a commercial flop.i think the problem is they’ve delegated that ‘human stuff’ to the tv series. secret invasion looks like it’s pretty close to that.
I probably should have used a different phrase than “commercial flop” (although worldwide grosses can often be a bit misleading as to overall quality, considering that Iron Man 3 is the top-grossing entry of the entire character series at $1.3 billion and the eighth highest-grossing superhero movie of all time). Perhaps I should have said that its rewatchability falls off drastically for general audiences compared to better films in the series.I think also that the really strange and fantastical stuff needs to have a really dynamic lead or ensemble for people to properly suspend their disbelief, which was one of Guardians of the Galaxy’s huge strengths and, I’d argue, one of Doctor Strange’s weaknesses. Maybe a Beta Ray Bill movie would work if they got the right person to play him. It’s an arguable point that the whole superhero genre would never have gotten off the ground without Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans providing an enormous one-two punch right out of the gate for Marvel. Hell, they were good enough that Marvel was able to integrate the Hulk into The Avengers using their third actor in the role with nary a hiccup.
a) The 4th highest-grossing film of the year didn’t “flop”.
b) Human stakes & drama can still happen in a fantastical setting.
c) They’ve got some more “normal” films coming up: New World Order, Thunderbolts, and Armor Wars.
“Human stakes & drama can still happen in a fantastical setting”Oh they absolutely can.They just haven’t been, in any of the recent Marvel properties for a good couple of years now.
I think Gunn’s Suicide Squad did the mix well. It helps that he is so good at the simple things like “here is a character, here is their quick backstory and what they want, now, look, here is a nice payoff to that and everything is settled in this movie”. Cause, effect, catharsis. Even a joke like Polk dot guy you understand all you need to about him and he gets a genuine moment (and then dies for a laugh…)
Fair point. I’ll narrow it down and say the MCU hasn’t had an authentic human emotion since…charitably, the middle of Phase 2, where the whole thing peaked with Guardians and Winter Soldier
Black Panther tho
I think Black Panther and Guardians 2 both had real emotion. Guardians 2 was all about family and dad’s and surrogate family, I don’t even remember if they had any ties to Thanos. Pretty self contained. BP was similar. Movie about monarchy, colonialism, etc. Bad third act due to shitty SFX, but the rest of the movie works. Since then I’d say it’s fallen apart.
At least it felt like the new Ant Man movie is sort of rooted in the Antman sadness for not having seen his daughter grow up from the trailers.
Both Suicide Squad movies were crap.
I didn’t think Polka Dot Man’s death was supposed to be funny? I thought it was supposed to be sad. The other characters looked sad about it. I felt sad, anyway.
With respect to these movies ‘flopping’ is relative to its peer movies, not all movies in general.
I’m going to build on your point and say Marvel is at its best when it’s constantly shifting tone and genre. Winter Soldier was a great throwback to 70s conspiracy thrillers. Black Panther was unique in its Afro-futurism. GotG was the first film not afraid to get weird. WandaVision was a great experiment until the last 2 episodes when it dropped the gimmick and became just another Marvel property. She-Hulk was refreshingly low-stakes. Dr. Strange 2, while flawed, was a Raimi film through-and-through.The key is to do this within each sub-franchise to keep things fresh, like with Thor: Ragnarok and Iron Man 3. Hell, all three Captain America films are very different from each other.
You’re 100% dead on. Phase 4 onward is missing those grounded political intrigue films that fill in the bureaucratic gaps of all the superhero activity.
It’s not that the movie was too weird, it’s that it was a shit movie, like nearly every superhero movie. 12 Rings, Captain Strange 2, Thor 4—all shit. Even Spiderman 3, which made all the money and had fun cameos, was a pure shit story, with one of the dumbest inciting incidents in recent memory.
Or what about The Eternals which posits that even super powerful celestial god beings still come up with ideas dumber than your average 24 year old tech bro. Also, the finale is about them killing a partially birthed fetus.
I agree with you. I think there should be a balance. And, let be clear, that movie with human stakes and drama also had giant flying aircraft carriers crashing into the capital in act 3. So it’s still all silly
You personally didn’t like Strange 2, but as others have pointed out: it earned $955M and was well-received by a majority of critics. It was successful in all the ways a commercial film can be, thus objectively not “too weird and loopy” for a critical or mass audience.Marvel’s biggest recent “failures” are Eternals and Black Widow*, which more or less broke even at $400M and $380M respectively. And those films, despite the Kirby acid-head insanity of the Eternals comics, were quite stylistically tame and tonally subdued. If anything, the commercial lesson of recent MCU is to embrace wacky ideas (Strange 2 and Spider-Man 3.) A Beta Ray Bill movie is probably the exact kind of thing they *do* want to make.(*Yes, I recognize the pandemic and D+ streaming made BW’s release complicated.)
Well, financially successful Dr Strange 2 definitely was but the not entirely dissimilar Everything Everywhere all at once did show up how much of a creatively bankrupt fraud DS2 was and how much it wasted its concept in comparison.
Personally, I agree with you. But from the perspective of a gigantic corporation who wants to churn out more of the specific sausages people want, DS2 did great and presents no reason they should change course.Everything Everywhere All at Once is absolutely a better and more interesting movie, but we’re talking about McDonald’s or Starbucks here. Disney-Marvel doesn’t care how their movies could be more interesting, they care which projects will reach $1B and which ones are a waste of marketing.
…and I’d argue it wasn’t that weird at all. If anything they could’ve stepped wayyyyy more into the weird and been just fine. Sloppy messy script that ignored Wandavision and didn’t focus on Strange’s journey, sounds more like it. And it did just fine in the box office!
Doctor Strange 2 was terrible, but it did not flop commercially. The rest of your post is right on, though. Winter Soldier is the best MCU film because it’s not trying to bombard you with superhero stuff for its entire run. It takes its time and anchors the “Cap blows up a flying aircraft carrier” stuff with the pathos of having to fight his best friend who he thought died 60 years ago.
Hopefully Cap 4 is a return to that sort of storytelling, and not just a dumb superhero punchfest like Civil War was.
I was hoping Black Widow would be the next Winter Soldier. When it ended up being Black Widow and her kooky family I gave up on Marvel ever doing another serious movie. I know Guardians 3 has the potential to be a serious movie, but so did Love and Thunder and that movie was over the top comedy for the vast majority of it.
Love and Thunder was a mistake, and Taika Waititi hopefully recognizes it. Ragnarok infused the Thor series with some wacky humor and let Chris Hemsworth indulge in his comic instincts, which is why it worked so well (also, Jeff Goldblum paradoxically being the grounding element of the off-planet wackiness). Waititi took that and turned it up to eleven with Love and Thunder and, like many directors before him, learned that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.Black Widow… wow. I could start a whole different thread on that movie. On paper it should have worked gangbusters. But the problem for me was that Florence Pugh was just so much more dynamic and engaging than Scarlett Johansson that it really pulled the story focus off of the protagonist.
Guardians 3, I still have hope for, because I like James Gunn and I loved the first movie and really liked the sequel (and the Christmas special!). I think because GotG started weird and kooky, they don’t have to reach for it and can actually dial back to some seriousness if they want. Most of the latter-day Marvel properties have had to do it the other way around.
I’m going to need receipts showing how Doc Strange MoM “flopped commercially”. Personally i didn’t care that much for it but it certainly seemed to succeed financially
Sorry, almost a billion dollars is a commercial flop now?
I’m definitely in the superhero fatigue camp, but it’s more the quality than the quantity. Especially with the MCU, all these movies look and feel exactly the same. I know that’s by design because it’s a shared universe, but god I find it so incredibly boring. It’s always actors standing in some Atlanta warehouse with a movie painted in CGI behind them. The Quantumania trailer was especially laughable in this aspect At least with DC there was enough creative freedom to deliver something like The Batman, which doesn’t resemble any other DC movie from a visual/tone perspective. Until Marvel truly gives a director creative freedom, they’ll continue to spiral the drain in my eyes.
The Quantumania trailer was especially laughable in this aspectLOL I just watched it, you’re absolutely right. Just this maximalist CGI hellscape with people plopped in it. They might as well have the 80’s-style green outline, at least it’d have some retro charm then.
They made an Ant Man movie where he doesn’t even beat up 3D Sylvester Stallone? What’s even the point?
If Kang the Conqueror isn’t accompanied by three holographic versions of himself as a hippie, a fireman, and a bald scientist, all played by Jonathan Majors, I’m walking out the theater
Wow I can’t believe they didn’t realistically depict a made-up realm.
But what DC got wrong in the past was the TV aspect. The CW turned off older people like me who had read comics by having every superhero be a teenager which they were not in the comics besides of course Spiderman. Green Arrow who I loved in the comics I hated on the CW.
The more distant DC movies are from the DCEU, the better they are. Is The Batman even a part of the DCEU?
The Batman is an “Elseworlds” label so not part of the main DCU per the new guard.
James Gunn actually confirmed recently that The Batman is not part of the DCEU, and that movie and its spinoffs will continue separately from anything the DCEU does.
With you on this, well said.
100% with you. I haven’t watched a Marvel movie or D+ show after Endgame. But I really enjoyed The Batman.
You know every now and then McDonald’s comes up with a limited-edition burger? Where they just swap, like, the Big Mac sauce for salsa and call it the McSouthWest, or add a slice of beetroot and call it the McCobber?
That’s what these movies are a feeling like. The exact same thing, with one ingredient tweaked.
Good call. I don’t know how anyone can stand to look at a Marvel film for ten minutes, let alone two hours.
I’d watch a new series every month if they wanted to make that many but I’m probably in the minority.
Right there with you. But I know I am an outlier. I’ll watch anything and everything MCU related because I just can’t believe there is an ongoing series of movies and shows about a universe full of superheroes. Do I like them all? No. Does it stop me from looking forward to them all? No.I know that at some point, the whole MCU will end. I’ll be enjoying the ride until it does.
Seriously! When I was buying Infinity Gauntlet at the supermarket back when it came out I never dreamed it would end up being made into basically a 10 year film project.
You’re another DenofGeek refugee! I know you!
Here’s the deal. We had nothing. We had Nicholas Hammond Spidey. We had a Hulk-Daredevil crossover where John Rhys-Davies, who will whore himself out for just about any role, refused to shave his head to play Kingpin. We had Dolph Fucking Lundgren as the Punisher.
We had nothing. Then… the world exploded. X2 and TobeySpider 2 STILL hold up as top 10 ever. Yeah, they fucked up FF, but I’d still take Ioan Gruffudd as my Reed over any of the other choices I’ve seen.
So I grow a little weary of a bunch of people who weren’t even alive when they were making FF movies just to keep the rights telling us they are full.
(And by the way, Star Wars fans, unless you walked through the desert between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace, when we all tried to pretend Dash Rendar was cool and not fucking stupid, then sit a few plays out about how you’re too exhausted to go see Last Jedi in December and Solo in May)
I really didn’t like Loki S1, so having to wait even LONGER for something I *am* excited for—because there’s no way Loki S2 is going to be one of the delayed shows—is frustrating.
i think it also might be worth pointing out that feige…maybe…just got really lucky and isn’t some brilliant tactician. i don’t want to be mean to the guy, but it does seem to be like he gets a lot of credit when something goes right and none of the criticism when something goes wrong. he seems completely bulletproof from any criticism, by virtue of his nebulous position.maybe, just maybe, maybe he benefitted from being the first person in history who ever had his job?
I think Feige deserves the credit he gets. All Disney cares about is the financials, and Feige has built a franchise with 30+ movies that have been financially successful. That’s unheard of in Hollywood history.
The biggest stroke of luck Feige (and Favreau, who doesn’t really get the credit he deserves for his part in the launch) had was in how badly Marvel screwed things up in the 90s.
If Marvel had the rights to Spider-Man and the X-Men from the jump, it is fairly likely they make the same mistakes Sony and Fox did. Maybe Cap happens, but Iron Man and Thor either don’t happen or are just supporting characters in other movies.
Feige had to work with the tools he had and benefitted creatively from it.
I’ve been saying this for years, but I do think the conventional wisdom that Marvel was handicapped by having to work with B-level heroes is exactly wrong. Really seems like you get diminishing returns with characters in this genre. DC had a lot better luck with audiences when they were working with Aquaman and Wonder Woman than they did with the big two, and I think it’s because audiences are already familiar with them and bring all these expectations into the theater. Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, they were all pretty blank slates as far as the general audience was concerned. But if/when they recast Tony Stark for a couple of new Iron Man movies, then recast Tony Stark again for another trilogy with a different tone, then recast yet again, audiences will be coming ready to tear it apart if it doesn’t match and live up to how they see the character. When they got started, zero chance of getting bogged down by debates about the weapons Iron Man were using the way people were going after Batman using guns, or Batman not obviously being “the greatest detective.” It seems to get harder and harder to keep going back to the well; there’s a limited amount of money you can wring out of a property before it starts to get to be more trouble than it’s worth.
When was the last time you heard someone bitch about who was cast as a certain MCU character? Maybe Brie Larson? (I was rooting for Yvonne Strahovski)That’s like every DC movie, someone bitching over casting.
The Avengers were probably the best possible characters to launch a shared universe with because they’re the most natural characters for the “solo movies, then teamup” approach. All the core Avengers star in comics of their own but also show up in the team’s comic. Neither the X-Men (who aside from Wolverine have never been successful as solo characters) or Spidey (who due to being a bit of an outcast, isn’t on teams very often) work that way.
If Marvel hadn’t been forced to use their less popular Avengers characters, they wouldn’t have been able to pull off the whole “phase 1 culminates with a teamup movie” thing successfully. It felt organic because they used those specific characters.
Sony didn’t make a mistake until Spider-Man 3 when they forced Raimi to make a movie he didn’t want to. Fox didn’t make a mistake with X-men until The Last Stand and Wolverine: Origins. Sony didn’t rectify their mistake. But Fox did for a bit. First Class, Days of Future Past, Wolverine 2, and Deadpool were all hits. Then they broke the franchise again with two mediocre sequels to Days of Future Past while also making one of the greatest superhero movies ever in Logan. Deadpool 2 was also much better than the first one in my opinion. I’d much rather have Fox in charge of X-Men than Marvel. Obviously, not a choice at this point.
So, Fox didn’t make an X-Men mistake until – checks notes – the THIRD movie?First Class and its sequels are the best example of what they fucked up.They had a great movie. They had three hot British dudes in McAvoy, Fassbender and Hoult. They had J-Law under a contract where she had to be blue! Zoe Kravitz! That kid from the Taylor Swift video! Plus, it was just so fucking retro coolXavier and Magneto should have been chasing each other through the 60s for at least two more movies. But instead, they went running back to the Jackman/Stewart teats. They made a good movie, but one that closed off tons of possibilities. Killing Emma Frost off screen? WTF?
MCU made a bad movie immediately after Iron Man 1 with Iron Man 2 though. Wasn’t that like the 3rd or 4th film in the MCU? Plus, Thor 1 and 2 and Captain America 1 are all mediocre. It wasn’t until The Avengers it got good again.
The goodness or badness of these movies isn’t so much the point (Although Cap 1 and Thor are better than you may remember. Thor 2, which is pretty much a slog, was after Avengers.)
The point is that there was a real plan. Solo movies and then come together. Cap 1 didn’t do gangbusters at the box office, but by then the Avengers train was thundering down the tracks and nothing was going to get in the way.
I don’t agree with this take at all. The MCU has had 30 movies thus far (Ant-Man 3 will be the 31st) including the Spider-Man movies they produced for Sony. Those movies have grossed over $28B (against a total production budget of $6-6.5B) and have generally been really well-received. Claiming the primary producer behind all of that got lucky is kind of ludicrous.Also don’t think Feige is the first producer ever who got freedom to enact his vision. He deserves blame for the Phase 4 and seemingly 5 content being a step down but the options don’t have to be effusive praise or completely disregarding everything he has done. Even if the MCU is never great again, Feige deserves credit for the Infinity Saga.
If it was luck then the guy is really lucky because no other studio or producer has been able to pull it off(and many tries over the last decade)I think luck is a factor in the MCU success but I think Feige also knows what he is doing. Or at least he did. Post Endgame it’s been clear they are kinda lost on what works and what doesn’t.
I think the well just ran dry. There have been 25 Bond films released since 1962, and they certainly aren’t all winners. A lot of them kind of feel the same. There have been 31 MCU films released since 2008, and the average one is much better than the average Bond. It’s quite an accomplishment, but they’ve burned themselves out.I think Endgame was just the high point and we’ll see diminishing returns from here on out.
Reminder that you’ll never be cool or liked
Seriously, how many studios and filmmakers do people need to see trip and fall on their faces trying to do what Feige did before they realize it wasn’t dumb luck? Half of my amazement for those first ten years in the MCU was that he pulled it off in the first place.
Sorry, but you only have to look at DC to see how good Feige is at his job. Or Star Wars. Or the Universal Studios Monsterverse. Or literally any of the other studios who have tried to build multi movie franchise storytelling and failed miserably.
The lowest grossing MCU movie last year made $761 million. That would be seen as a phenomenal success for any other studio, but instead it was met with headlines about “superhero fatigue.” Seems to me that if anything, people are so eager to criticize Feige that they’ll pretend hit movies are flops just so they have an excuse to say he’s failing.
Law of averages says that one day Marvel will have an ACTUAL flop (hey, it might happen this very weekend!) and the moment it does, Feige’s world is going to cave in on itself. The pressure he’s under must be enormous. He can’t keep this up forever, but I think he deserves a lot of credit for being able to keep up such a winning streak for fifteen years.
Also, if you want to get technical, he’s not the first person to be in charge of a shared universe, as Universal built one with its monster films in the 40’s, a project which was largely masterminded by Erle Keaton. Of course studios were structured very differently back then so I’m sure Keaton and Feige had very different responsibilities, but Feige was not the first person to try this.
I don’t think you get lucky 25 times in a row. I mean, Feige had a lot of help and others deserve to share the credit, but I think his props for being the ultimate driving force behind the MCU are well-deserved. And at this point, i don’t think one actual flop will bring his world crashing down. He’s probably one of the top 3 executive producers in history in terms of overall box office (I’m guessing maybe Cameron or Lucas or someone else would be up there as well). Even if he has a stumble, as long as he can follow it up with a hit, I think he’ll be ok (a few misfires in a row would be different, but even then I think his long-term legacy remains intact).
Every single act in life has an element of luck attached but similarly, you make your own luck to make use of it. If you put 5k on red and it becomes 10k, you’ve been lucky but you made that luck happen by taking the risk. Kevin Feige has managed to oversee a streak of box office success that even peak-Pixar can’t boast all while maintaining IP which historically had flopped, being heavily involved in corporate synergy of obtaining new lucrative IP and all while having to deal with and outlive Ike Perlmutter.As much as all of that is a reminder of how the world of IP-cinema is pretty disgusting and icky, he deserves plenty of credit for being the very best kind of what he is.
lol ok
There really has been much ado about whether things that never bothered comics fans will inevitably be lethal to movie audiences. Given Marvel’s demonstrated ability to shatter conventional notions of the changes you need to make to translate across media, I continue to be unconvinced by the arguments.It’s worth pointing out that journalists and bloggers were predicting the inevitable “superhero fatigue” before Marvel Studios came into existence.
When we’re talking superhero fatigue, I think what we’re really talking about is bad movie fatigue. It’ll catch up to the MCU eventually, just like every other franchise in history that didn’t know when to end.
I think part of the flaw in this logic is thinking that the MCU is like other movie franchises. It’s not. It’s like the comic book universe, which is neverending and that’s a good thing. Other franchises die because they replace the stars, or stray too far from the original tone or aesthetic; those aren’t relevant concerns here. Or they just run out of material and have to force or stretch things, another issue that a 60+-year-old forked narrative universe won’t have to worry about.A string of truly terrible movies could hurt them, but that may never happen, and again it might not be the killer you think. DC has put out a ton of terrible movies, and people are still excited about every new Batman. The string of mostly terrible comic book movies that predated the MCU didn’t hurt the MCU.People resent the dominance in the industry, but that’s less a factor of too much Marvel and more too little anything else. No one makes any movies any more that aren’t franchise extensions, adaptations, and remakes anyway. In this context, we should be grateful that there is so much good material that can be adapted well and not just rebooted with diminishing returns. Sure, the movies need to keep being good, but there’s no real reason to think they won’t (mostly) be.
It’s like a TV soap opera.
Didn’t know how to end? The MCU ended with Endgame. They stuck the landing. Nothing past that matters in my opinion.
I first started hearing it around the time Cap: First Avenger came out and wasn’t a huge blockbuster. Although now, it routinely makes Top 10 MCU lists.
I agree completely with the premise of this article but long ago gave up trying to predict when things would grind to a halt. I think the franchise has become impenetrable to newcomers (even if that’s perception more than reality) but as others have pointed out, kids have a lot of time on their hands to get up to speed with the back catalog.
We’ll see. I’ve yet to see anything that doesn’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Viewers are rewarded more the more other things they have seen, but it doesn’t require them. A hell of a lot of people who enjoyed No Way Home never sat through those Amazing movies. But when Hollywood is essentially in free-fall and one company continues to find success by sticking with their own storytelling system that has worked since the early 1960s but runs counter to prevailing Hollywood wisdom, I don’t get why so many people are so sure that Hollywood is right and Marvel is wrong.
Because they *want* Marvel to be wrong.
I’ve said this for a while now – I don’t think it’s fatigue, I think the content is just worse overall. They are trying to do way too much at once and that is resulting in their creative and their technical teams being overextended, leading to worse plots and worse looking CGI.
yeah i don’t think there is “too much” – they generally don’t have more than one new show running on D+ at a time, so its like a 1 hour a week thing, plus like 3 movies a year.Its more that what we’re getting doesn’t seem as exciting as the earlier material. Some of it is sequelitis, some of it is constantly overstuffing these things in order to promote what is coming next (which the article points out, fairly), and of course some of the series suffer from being lower budget than the movies as well as pacing issues. imo of course.
Yeah, they are rushing to cash in while they can, so they’re just throwing all this stuff at us. The Marvel properties aren’t going anywhere. You don’t need to release three movies and three shows each year, but you feel you have to make all the money as quickly as possible.
Yep, the stories are never bad just meh, like fast food its tolerable and sometimes good but you don’t want it every day. Also Marvel never really had great or even good CGI, but FFS its PS2 quality now.
Awful lot of whining from everybody.
I’m a fairly casual comics fan, the Xmen were my jam for a few years, I’ve read some others here and there but never followed for really long, enough to know basic story lines for major DC and Marvel heroes. I know of Beta Ray Bill, but I couldn’t really give you any details on him for example.Superhero fatigue for me is real. The latest Thor and Dr Strange movies were a slog for me. I like Ant Man so I am looking forward to that, knowing it’s only 2 hours doesn’t hurt. At this point if they start to introduce more fringe characters that I’m not familiar with, they need to fix their formula. I didn’t bother seeing the Eternals because I didn’t know much about them and from everything I heard it sounded like a basic marvel movie with nothing really unique about the plot.
And there lies the problem with fandom, right in a nutshell.
“Ugh, do something new”
“Ack, not like that!”
How about not making the third act a CGI cartoon of faceless drones shooting light beams at each other?
Also, let’s keep the movies trim. I was going to watch Wakanda Forever on Disney+ last night and it’s 2 hours and 45 minutes long.
The movies are way too long. I watched Shang-Chi, and there was a decent movie in there if someone had bothered to edit.
Imagine if it had ended with a good old fashioned father and son kung-fu fight instead of the light show of dragons and glowing arrows and all that junk?
The last half was a different movie. The fight scenes were all too long—and I love a good fight scene.
I’ve just decided that Marvel is not making movies for me, and that’s fine. I’m sure they will take my opinion into account while they watch the zeros roll in.
This is a big one for me. 2:30+ runtime of every single movie is just too much.
My personal edit on rewatch was to skip every flashback. Makes for an infinitely better movie.
What, did it interrupt your fap schedule?
My got to joke lately is Wakanda Forever is in reference to its runtime. Having to watch a movie over two nights should be reserved for costume dramas and historical epics. A super hero movie should stick to two hours
My dream feature for Netflix is letting anyone edit TV shows/movies and having the new cuts publicly available.
yeah too long for one sitting imo. not exactly helping motivate me to go to the theaters more. in fact felt like Wakanda Forever might have worked better split into part 1 and 2, i dunno. Either that or just cut out agent ross and riri completely as they felt shoehorned in to me.
I am an MCU fan and yeah, I am feeling the fatigue. Personally, a big part of it is that my life has changed substantially since Iron Man came out in 2008. Especially starting a family, I just don’t have the time or energy to invest in pop culture properties that I once did. Add to that some offerings from the MCU that seemed “meh” to me personally (Ant-Man 2, Eternals, FatWS, the second part of Loki) and it just gets harder to care. Especially when a lot of the people I cared about have been phased out.I still enjoy the movies and see them when I can. I am actually excited if post-Kang the next big bad is Mephisto and we get to explore the supernatural horror corners of the MCU even more. I imagine at one point the X-Men are going to show up and that will be cool. But overall, the MCU went from “this is awesome, I need to watch this opening night!” to “I will get it when I get around to it and probably going to skip the shows that do not really appeal to me”.
Have you introduced your children to the MCU or the DCU? Or the much older movies you loved in your youth? Hope you have or will.
Thats a great point and I will. My kids are pre-pre-school, so they are mostly fascinated by facts about animals and mirrors. My partner and I have talked about how fun it will be to introduce them to this stuff when they are old enough to get it, and I am sure that will ignite some of my old thrill.
It really is fun. I’m mostly in your position as far as these movies go. Used to excitedly see every one opening night. Now I mostly watch on Disney+ when I get time. But my kids are old enough, and so we’ve been watching through them. We’re on Civil War now. And it really is a lot of fun. Same with watching favorites from my youth with them. It’s fun to see their reactions. We’re also watching Willow after watching the movie twice.
You really hit on the head exactly how I feel about the whole thing. I got married in 2018 and had my first daughter in 2020 and movies, particularly these movies, have really taken a back seat since then. You just don’t have the time (or the money) that you used to have to care about all these characters and make sure you’ve seen everything. It just becomes too much. I’m mostly content to just wait til the movies get to Disney + now and skip seeing them at the theater.
Congrats on the marriage and child!
The only way Feige can combat superhero fatigue is to get some of those fictional Pym particles, travel back in time, and space the releases out over a greater time span.
“superhero fatigue” is something everybody loves to point to as a real phenomenon that’s happening but then Doctor Strange 2 will gross close to a billion dollars so like, is it actually happening or are people trying to manifest it into being so in five or whatever years when it inevitably starts to show clear signs of happening they can be like “told you so!!” if you repeatedly claim the death of something has happened you’ll be correct eventually
Marvel’s Kevin Feige has a plan to combat superhero fatigue. Will it work?As a Marvel fan of respectable credentials (I own precisely 3,528 individual issues of Marvel comics, not including variants) who has seen every MCU production and has advance tickets booked for Ant-Man 3, please allow me to answer this:No.Even I’m fed up.
Aw, look at you thinking you matter.
So fed up you gotta pre-order those tickets for the Rotten Ant-Man movie?
Stop forcing me to punch myself in the face!
The Marvel TV shows have become what the monthly comics were and the movies the annuals and special events. One of the things the monthlies had going for them was there was filler where not much was happening and people just talked about their regular problems. In that filler you got to care more about the characters before they had to stop the end of the world. You get that in Ms. Marvel and those kinds of shows. It makes the world richer and it’s fun to just check in on it like back in the day with the comics. DC doesn’t have that yet.
The trailer for Quantumania made me say “that looks cool, I’ll catch it on D+”The trailer for The Flash made me want to see it opening night (never thought I’d feel that way about a movie again).I thought I was burned out on superheroes, turns out I’m burned out on Marvel.
I stopped watching MCU content at the end of Infinity War due to fatigue and that feeling that if I did not see everything I would not know what was happening. I am please with my decision and I would not mind going back if some movie or TV show was not part of some set up for the next thing.
Personally I’m done until Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E.
Yeah, the fatigue set in somewhere around Iron Man 2. I get it – witty quips flying as superheroes with varying abilities and levels of plot armour used to even out the abilities face a seemingly insurmountable challenge, but some how come out victorious and all still alive to star in the next movie.The last couple Avengers movies captured my attention again – half of them ‘died’, but was burnt out on the formula again as soon as Endgame finished.
LOLOLOLOL… So, fatigue set in on the THIRD movie out of 31? OK, champ. Whatever. Go have some orange slices.
Yep, had a enough of the formula after just a few. Not sure why there being 28 more movies to not watch is so amusing to you, but wait till you find out that there are lots of people who never watched any.
I know. I hope those people have to wear special hats so I can mock them.
I am sure there are many more people that mock you and others for watching ANY super-hero movies. Whether you like or not, they are NOT to everybody’s taste.
No fatigue here, all good! The gripes about Ant-Man 3 sound like the gripes about Iron Man 2 or Age or Ultron which I didn’t find layering in future plots overrode the actual narrative so that didn’t bother me in any way
I for one hope there is fatigue, even if its just for something new occasionally. I feel like a kid when my comic file would fill up….then i would empty it…..it would fill…then i realized it will never end, and i grew up and found other things. I wish cinema would find other things, but it won’t. I am simply sick of marvel at this point.
Superhero fans are like Trump fans: no amount of bullshit is going to turn them off. Captain American could grab em by the pussy and the fanboys would still be lined up around the block. As for me, I’m over it. OOOOOOVER it. So over it. Absolutely done times infinity, don’t ever need to see another second’s comicbook bullshit again.
Marvel can get me excited to see a Marvel movie again by starting over. Reboot. They have FF, XMen, and 50% custody of Spider-Man. It’s been god damn 15 years and three Batman reboots (fourth one working!) in the same universe.
Does anyone remember the great comic book crash of the mid-90s? I’ve been waiting for that to happen with superhero movies for a decade now. How anyone still cares to watch any of these is beyond me.
DC’s movies are remarkably bad since WB/DC never had a working plan, and their unlimited praise of crap like WW84 just alerted us to the mess they have become. And while the MCU does have a plan, having movies that depend on ancillary material the audience might or might not have seen/consumed is just complicating everything. Superhero fatigue is a real thing. The last superhero movie I saw in the cinema was Doctor Strange 2, one of the only 3 movies I saw in the cinema in 2022. I haven’t even caught up with the ones that are already streaming, and see no rush to do so. Every MCU movie or TV show is just another chapter of a very long still being written book, and sometimes all you need is an enjoyable entertaining distraction in a short story or another book.
If there’s superhero fatigue, then it’s because of quality, not quantity.
I burnt out really hard after Infinity War. It’s too much. If they have to happen we should only have one Marvel a year.
This fatigue thing is funny. I don’t see all the cop show fatigue comments, or too many cooking show fatigue or endless tiktok dance fatigue comments.
It is ok not to like this stuff, and not watch it all, but the exhaust people are rambling about is just generally funny
If the movies ae good, then there is no such thing as fatigue.
Didn’t this asshole *just* say that superhero fatigue wasn’t a thing?Kevin Feige is a mutant! He can talk out of both sides of his mouth at once!
Finding a formula that doesn’t turn the last third of the movie into the exact same fight sequence would probably help.
Yet the plot of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness was dependent on having seen WandaVisionNo it wasn’t. It was dependent on seeing the Infinity War movies, but that’s not a bad thing.
Hear me out here: just make them completely filthy. Just, hardcore NC-17 across the board. Keep the camp writing and big glitzy effects shots, but in between them? Just non-stop ham-slamming. Every second someone isn’t chuckling and saying “well that just happened” or something isn’t exploding in a big fireball, I want the screen to be a sea of moist, undulating flesh.
Yeah I truly don’t know how people keep up with all this stuff, and I too hate the word “content” and the job of “content creator.” A whole industry built on putting just…anything…on screens for us to stare at for more hours and hours. It’s sad that we as a society think this is something we need, and if you’re an actual artist making films or TV shows or some other type of performance art I can see why you’d feel annoyed that people see what you do as merely “content.” That said, I’m not sure that what Feige and Marvel are doing is so very different…
Breaking news: Comic books that have been running monthly issues with the same characters for sixty years with constant crossovers, deaths that are never permanent, and endless clashes with the same villains inspire movies that don’t come to satisfying conclusions.
“Fans who want to see storylines satisfyingly finished will find
themselves following those plot threads endlessly because the stories
are designed purposefully not to conclude.”Seems to me that’s basically the definition of a comic book narrative
“Yet the plot of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness was dependent on having seen WandaVision”It absolutely was not. One of my biggest issues with that movie is that I wished it had actually tied in to WandaVision instead of just a throw-away reference and using the same house and kids for a brief scene.
Slowing down? Aren’t there still 3 films a year and 3 to 4 TV series slated for the next 2 years? The movies are now like the comics, the story never ends. I was an avid reader of the comics but I gave up as each story leads to others, villains never die or are imprisoned for long, heroes will change but the status quo will reestablish itself. I was impressed that Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man were hits for such obscure characters. But it was much newer 5-10 years ago.