"I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"

There are times when the entertainment media seems to represent movies as bigger successes than they are--grading box office performance on a curve.

This does not seem to have been the case with Captain Marvel 2, the press--which had loudly anticipated a flop before the film's release--calling the film a flop after that first weekend in release (and still more, the second).

However, those "analyses" of the film's performance I have encountered seem to be doing so as part of a particular game--emphasizing that yes, this particular superhero movie is a flop, but one should not draw any wider conclusions from that. Chalk this one up as a misfire suggestive of nothing more than slightly better management over at Marvel could easily fix--not superhero fatigue.

Yet consider the undeniable pattern since the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)'s Phase Three wrapped up back in 2019. Of the MCU movies released since only one really went "above and beyond" at the box office--Spider-Man in December 2021. Of course, one could reasonably chalk up the lackluster performance of its three predecessors (Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi) to the effect of the pandemic and the associated experimentation with streaming (and at the global level, Marvel's shutout from the Chinese market, even if in fairness Marvel should have understood what it was getting into there), but it was also the case that Dr. Strange 2 looked like an underperformer given how well the Spider-Man film it was tied in with had just done, and the fainter than usual competition that season. And everything since has been unambiguously less successful, with the four next MCU sequels (Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Ant-Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy 3), when the grosses are adjusted for inflation, down 20 to 50 percent from the grosses of the preceding films in their series'. Now Captain Marvel 2 seems almost certain to do worse than that. (Going by my estimates its gross could end up 80 percent down from what the first Captain Marvel made.)

And of course, what has been bad for the MCU has been worse for its principal rival, the DC Extended Universe, which saw Black Adam get a weak reception (failing to crack $400 million global), Shazam 2 make the third-stringer performance of the first Shazam look like boffo b.o. by comparison, and The Flash . . . well, it was pretty shocking back in June, though now we are used to such performances.

This seems to me like a pretty consistent pattern of weak performances by such films--the more in as, in contrast with the 2020-2021 period other movies are becoming really vast successes (as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie did, for example).

Considering all that my only objection to talk of superhero fatigue is that it understates the problem when we look at a year in which along with the declining grosses of the superhero films Fast and Furious, Transformers, Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible also suffered. Superhero fatigue is really a subset of a wider franchise fatigue and action movie fatigue and blockbuster fatigue, which fatigue for the moment shows no sign of abating--while being a thing Hollywood, and the claqueurs of the entertainment press, can still less afford to admit given how much more deeply threatening it is to the model by which they have made so much money for so long, and for which the increasingly battered studios have absolutely no substitute at hand as they try to keep themselves afloat.