Ant-Man 3's Underperformance and the Trajectory of Marvel

In the view of the analysts I have read the disappointing box office performance of Ant-Man 3 was a measure of the viability not only of a relatively minor superhero movie, but rather the bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe of which it is a part--with the disappointment the more significant because of how the franchise has fared in recent years. Once going from strength to strength, all the way up to the two-part confrontation of the MCU's assembled heroes with Thanos (a two-film, $5 billion grossing whose second part became the "highest-grossing film in history") it has been very different with the subsequent "Phase Four." Certainly its problems (and particularly those of its first three movies--Black Widow, The Eternals, and Shangi-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) have been partially attributable to the pandemic, and at the international level, also to Phase Four's shutout from China's market. However, it is undeniable that the content itself has been an issue, with anything after Phase Three's build-up to and realization of the battle with Thanos an anticlimax--no "going bigger" really plausible here--while there was a pervasive sense of the pursuit of diminishing returns, be it in the turn toward prequels with Black Widow, to more obscure characters in The Eternals, and the all too characteristic weariness and tonal confusion of a series gone on too long in Thor: Love and Thunder, even before one considers such awkwardness as the excessive eagerness of Disney to tie its feature films to its small-screen streaming series in Dr. Strange 2 and the presentation of a Black Panther sequel without . . . Black Panther. The result was that only the Spider-Man sequel, which was again a one-of-a-kind event in its drawing together the stuff of three separate big-screen Spider-Man series into one sprawling "multiverse" narrative really felt like an event. And unsurprisingly, only that one performed really "above and beyond" at the box office (in fact becoming the movie that, with almost $2 billion banked globally, proved "filmgoing is back").

The result has been that even the claqueurs of the entertainment press no longer applaud Marvel so loudly as they once did, instead admitting that all is not well. One could see this as setting up audiences for a story of fall and redemption ("Hooray for Phase Five! Hooray for the return of Bob Iger! And boo Bob Chapek and Kevin Feige! Boo!"). However, Ant-Man 3 never looked to me a particularly likely source of redemption (even if it succeeded it was a long shot for the kind of $2 billion+ success that would really make people say "Marvel is back!"), and, again, it has only contributed to the sense of a franchise in trouble.

Of course, one should also qualify that. Before the (justified) turn of the view of Ant-Man 3 as hit into a view of it as a flop the film did have that strong opening weekend, testifying to the continued readiness of a significant audience to come out for even a second-string Marvel movie. The drop-off after that first weekend suggests that they were less than impressed with what they saw--and that rather than people giving up on Marvel, Marvel is simply doing a poorer job of satisfying the expectations it raises, such that they will in time be less likely to come out that way once more. After all, as we have been reminded time and again, no franchise is bulletproof, with Star Wars now reminding us of the fact--and Marvel, which in its dominance of blockbuster filmmaking for so many years looked like Star Wars in its heyday, perhaps now beginning to remind us of Star Wars in its now conspicuous and advanced decline.