Is Marvel Making the Same Mistakes As DC?

A couple of weeks ago I read this review of The Marvels which was anything but positive.  Considering how people loved the early MCU at this point it's basically devolved to the level of Michael Bay Transformers or Fast & Furious movies where it's an OK popcorn movie and not much else.

I got thinking that maybe the problem with the MCU lately is more than "superhero movie fatigue" or even that they've lost most of the original cast.  Part of the problem recently might be that they're making the same mistakes as DC did with its ill-fated universe.

When it started, the MCU was very patient, probably because they (and Disney) weren't really sure it'd work.  They started with Iron Man and Incredible Hulk.  The former was a huge success and the latter mostly a failure so they left that one behind and did another Iron Man movie two years later.  (2009 was the only year in the MCU era with 0 movies released to theaters or streaming.)  Then the next year they took it to the next level with Captain America and Thor movies.  And only then after the main four heroes had been introduced (and Nick Fury, Black Widow, and Hawkeye in supporting roles) did they bring out The Avengers.  The whole thing took 4 years to put together.  I still don't think it's a great movie but it was ambitious and entertaining and the plot hangs together well enough.

Anyway, looking at recent Marvel offerings you can see where they rushed a lot of it.  With The Marvels, two of the characters were only in TV series; Monica Rambeau was only a supporting character in WandaVision.  Even Captain Marvel was only in one solo movie and a supporting role in Endgame both back in 2019.  (The character of Captain Marvel in comics only goes back to 2013; before that she was Ms. Marvel.)  So you can really excuse audiences for not being hugely excited about a team-up of characters they're barely familiar with--if at all.

There was the same problem with Ant-Man 3 where they shoved so much into it and by some reports half-assed the effects.  The whole Kang thing they had vaguely brought up in the last couple of episodes of Loki and now he's the main villain for that Ant-Man movie and the foundation for the next two phases of the MCU?

Or look at Black Panther 2 where they ham-fistedly shove in "Ironheart" and half-assedly introduce Namor.  The latter was in part due to rights issues but still for a character basically as old as Marvel itself it was pretty weak.  The Ironheart thing was pretty unnecessary and had no real setup beforehand, not even a TV show.  And the character is pretty new in comics as well, so she really needed some introduction ahead of time.

Dr. Strange 2 was less of an offender but the main villain hadn't even really taken a heel turn before we see her pop up in the movie.  So, again, kinda half-assed.

And then you have the Eternals with all that stuff just thrown at you, leaving a lot of questions like, "Where the hell were these idiots all this time?"

The only one I think that doesn't fall into this is Shang-Chi.  That went back to the traditional Marvel formula and while it has a couple of unnecessary cameos (Abomination, Wong, and Ben Kinglsey) it was probably the best of recent Marvel movies in my mind.

Getting back to the title, I think at this point Marvel is making the mistake DC made.  After a moderate success with Man in Steel, DC decided to just throw their whole Trinity together in a movie and ham-fistedly introduce three more:  Aquaman, Flash, and Cyborg.  And then do a Justice League movie a year later when there hadn't even been solo movies for any of the characters except Superman and technically Wonder Woman, though they were basically shooting her solo movie at the same time as Justice League.  And at the same time throw together Suicide Squad with a bunch of villains not shown before.  It was just throwing a lot at audiences in movies that weren't that good, so it's no surprise it fell flat.  DC only had any success when they did solo movies with Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam.  

Then for some dumb reason they decided to say the hell with that and throw a bunch of junk in The Flash and just throw a half-assed Justice Society together in Black Adam.  And those also fell flat, though there were extenuating circumstances with the Flash one too.

Anyway, the point is that maybe part of the "superhero fatigue" is just these movies throwing so much at people who, unless they read comics, aren't that familiar with all of it.  And Disney insisting people watch TV shows first just makes it harder to get casual fans into it.  If you think about it, if you have all these characters together in a 2-2 1/2-hour movie there's just not much time to do much with characters, so unless the audience is familiar with them, they aren't going to have much opportunity to know the characters or care about them.  It's been the problem with X-Men movies and especially with Transformers movies where they insist on wasting 2/3 of every movie on human idiots so there's no chance to give the robots more than rudimentary personalities, thus all but 2 have basically been interchangeable. A team-up like The Avengers worked because there had already been 5 movies to introduce the main characters.

Largely I think the problem for Marvel is the bar got set so high that they felt pressure to top themselves and keep the interest of audiences.  After the huge team-up in Endgame, how do you top that?  They really can't but I think they figured they couldn't just go back to simple solo movies like those early ones.  You have to shove in more characters.  Plus then the pandemic messed things up by pushing back movies and forcing more reliance on Disney+ to introduce new characters.

There's probably also some hubris.  After the first 11 years where they were pretty much invincible, Kevin Feige and company probably thought they could do no wrong.  But now that they've had a few bad movies--with The Marvels likely to be an actual flop unless it does big business internationally--the narrative is shifting and Marvel seems very vincible.  It's basically what happened to Star Wars after The Last Jedi alienated so many fans.  In that case it took getting back to basics with The Mandalorian to start righting the ship, but they still haven't had a movie since Episode IX, whereas Marvel already has movies like Captain America Brave New World that have wrapped or like Deadpool 3 are almost done.  It was easier for Star Wars since they didn't have any movies upcoming for them to recalibrate and make changes; it's going to be a lot harder for Marvel with movies already in the pipeline.  It's like a football team adjusting during a bye week vs. having to adjust spontaneously during the game; it can be really hard to just change direction instantly.  At this point it might be throwing bad money after bad.

Anyway, it seems like they've made the same mistake as DC in rushing too many characters too quickly and it winds up turning audiences off because they aren't invested in it.  There will still be people who go to watch it as spectacle but it really opens the door for something else to take over.

That's how you kill the golden goose.