Short version: in a couple of decades a number of changes, the most important of which was the proliferation of TV, meant that measured on a per capita basis Americans' trips to the movie theater fell from thirty to four, and the studios struggled then and continue to struggle now simply to maintain that level. Over that period they have developed and utilized many strategies to accomplish that object (bigger screens, color and 3-D to provide a superior visual experience; "edgier" fare than the more thoroughly censored small screen could offer, etc., etc.), but improvement in TV technology (color, bigger screens and high-definition; access to more content via cable, home video, streaming; the relaxation of censorship over television until it became edgier than the movies) progressively narrowed their options. And these days filmmakers have only two options left, namely:
1. Deliver the kind of spectacle TV production companies still can't deliver on their budgets, while extracting every bit of impact from screens bigger than any TV-maker offers, to offer a sensory experience such as viewers still cannot have at home; and
2. Make your movie seem like an "event" that people want to participate in right now, rather than waiting for two or three months and catching the thing on streaming at a much lower price.
Big-budget action-adventure films with salable brand names fit the bill well, and in this century, none have more consistently done so than Marvel, which offered the requisite spectacle while making its movies seem an event even as it put out three of them in a year in what still stands as the only really successful attempt at a "Shared Universe" (as the fate of such efforts with Star Wars, Warner Brothers' Justice League, Universal's "Dark Universe," and the rest make all too clear).
Where the matter of making the films seem like an "event" is concerned Marvel benefited greatly from the fact that where DC characters had been previously familiar--and new versions of their stories unavoidably and often unfavorably compared to their predecessors--they were putting their not-much-less famous characters on the big screen for the first time, and in the process delivering something new in at least visual terms (like Spider-Man in a really big-budget, big-screen production for the first time ever, swinging his way through New York in Sam Raimi's original 2002 film). As more and more such characters got the treatment there was still the interest of cross-overs, culminating in the gathering together of Iron Man, and Captain America, and Thor--and the Hulk, and Black Widow, and Nick Fury, and Hawkeye--that helped make 2012's The Avengers an event. Subsequently Phase 3's continued milking of the interest of multi-hero cross-over events (from Captain America 3 forward), mobilization of "identity politics" behind Black Panther and Captain Marvel gave those films "event" status claims, and the films' collectively offering an arc which drew that whole "universe" of superheroes together into their biggest cross-over event as they fought their biggest enemy ever in their climactic battle with Thanos, saw the franchise go from strength to strength.
By contrast nothing of the kind could be claimed for Phase 4, by which time a very great deal had already been done, and the franchise could not go bigger, while the law of diminishing returns was kicking in very forcefully. The interest of certain critical figures was already exhausted (Thor), while by this point the figures being put on-screen for the first time tended to be less well-known to the broader audience (The Eternals, Shang-Chi--Spider-Man they are not). And the makers of the films did not exactly rise to the challenge the situation posed. An origin story for Black Widow could seem an anti-climax to her prior adventures, as prequels so often do; Dr. Strange, another of the less well-known figures, had a sequel movie tied in with the Wandavision TV series in a way problematic for the broader audience that could not all be counted upon to have seen it; and Black Panther 2 was mainly an event to the extent that it was connected with a prior movie that had been an event (while dispensing with the lead character and actor who played him!).
In the end, only Spider-Man: No Way Home, with its ever-popular hero and retconning of the two prior Spider-Man franchises into a single multiverse-spanning narrative could seem really an event that way. And unsurprisingly it was the only really spectacular, Marvel Cinematic Universe-at-its-peak, billion dollar barrier-bursting success (with the fact that, if one can blame the pandemic for much of the underperformance of the first three movies one cannot do the same for that of the three movies which followed Spider-Man underlining the fact). And right now I have my doubts that there is anywhere left to go in this respect--the Phase 5 slate of films already in the pipeline. (Indeed, Ant-Man 3, will be coming to a theater near you scarcely two months from now.) Some of them might make decent money (with Captain America 4 perhaps the best bet that way, to go by their prior track records). But I see no sign of anything that will bring back the sense of Marvel releases as events that did so much for the franchise's first three phases, with all that implies for the franchise's fortunes in the coming years.
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