Marvel is Not "Back" and (Probably) Never Will Be

All too predictably the presentist, hot take-spewing idiots of the entertainment press have seized upon the undeniable colossal success of Spider-Man: Brand New Day to tell us "Marvel's back!"

As is so often the case with those of their sort they are engaged in empty sloganeering. After all, in a way Marvel never left. Say what one will, Disney-Marvel has kept the movies, and TV shows, coming at the old rate--some fifteen of them from Black Widow to the aforementioned Spider-Man in a space of a little over five years. And many of those films have been profitable. The two Spider-Man films released in this period have been the biggest grossers of that franchise's history, even after adjustment for inflation, while Deadpool & Wolverine was the same for the broader X-Men franchise of which it is a part, as they helped demonstrate that today the biggest movies can sell as many tickets as ever they did. And still other Marvel releases were at least respectable moneymakers, with four more films making Deadline's three post-pandemic Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament lists in 2022 and 2023 Dr. Strange 2, Black Panther 2, Thor 4 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3).

However, it is also the case that, even when we set aside those three movies that never had much of a chance because of their release when the (still ongoing) pandemic still had the box office severely depressed (Black Widow, The Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), Marvel has had a good many undeniable underperformers, with The Marvels competitive with the DCEU's The Flash as the biggest flop of flop-filled 2023, and Ant-Man 3, Captain America 4, The Thunderbolts safely classifiable as such, all as it was far from unreasonable to see even the profitable Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and Dr. Strange 2 as less than ringing successes given what their predecessors made, and what had been hoped for from and invested in them (Thor and Black Panther relative to their immediate predecessors in their franchises, Dr. Strange 2 to the way the last Spider-Man film had set it up to be a great success).

The result is that if Marvel never left, it is also not "back" to what the aforementioned presentist, hot take-spewing idiots imply when they say so, namely back to the franchise's "Phase Three" (2016-2019) when it felt like Marvel could put out three movies a year and see each gross a billion dollars or close to it (in 2016-2019 dollars, equal to about $1.3-$1.4 billion now), as they ignore the difference in the situation between then and now. The consistent, colossal, success of Phase Three was not so much a matter of the Marvel "brand" (which is the product, not the cause of the company strategy) as Marvel organized its film production in such a manner that one Marvel film led to another, every next Marvel movie contributing in at least a small way to a story building to a climax in the billion-dollar, everybody-showed-up, shocking cliffhanger-reinforced two-part Avengers event that capped it all off. Admittedly more a feat of marketing than of cinematic technique or narrative art it is naively optimistic to imagine that this generation of a synergy that made the mega-franchise "more than the sum of its parts" for so long could make this work again and again, the more in as the success eliminated the novelty; there really is no "going bigger" after Endgame; the raw material on which the franchise depended has become overfamiliar, the principal characters, storylines, etc. all well-used by this point, leaving any approach (rebooting the major characters, turning to less popular ones) likely to lead to diminishing returns; and Marvel even used up its easy options for making its movies seem more "important" than they really were in the current milieu (as with the silly passing off of Black Panther and Captain Marvel as civil rights firsts). The fact that Marvel followed up this extraordinary success with the comparatively plan-less Phase Four and the aborting of the plan for Phase Five's multi-verse saga; the generally less prepossessing character of the movies that followed; the sprawling of the Universe as Marvel stupidly imagined a blockbuster-sized base would display a hardcore fan's readiness to sign up for their streaming service and see every last show and movie and the blowback against it; did not help Marvel retain the audience's affection, and indeed alienated at least a part of it, at a time when no moviemaker could afford it. The pandemic, after all, not only made things harder by disrupting the habit many had of seeing every single Marvel movie that came out, but more broadly produced a contraction in moviegoing that left Americans on average going to the theater two rather than three to four times a year, and pickier about what they deigned to see on the big screen, leaving less room for a see-all-three-Marvel-movies-per-year-type habit. (Meanwhile at the international level Marvel, like the rest of Hollywood, treated the important and hugely profitable Chinese market very lightly indeed, and paid dearly for it, not least with the stupid decision to make a Fu Manchu-based film starring Akwafina thinking "The Chinese will love it!")

The result has been that rather than the Marvel Cinematic Universe being the synergy-benefiting commercial force it was in Phase Three today it is what it was before that, a looser collection of franchises. I will not say that it is absolutely impossible for those franchises to again become something greater than the sum of the parts, but the difficulty of making the old strategy work even the first time, the tougher market now less likely to be receptive to a second go-around, make this hard to picture, all as anything like such a renaissance for the franchise has no precedent in film history. James Bond, Star Wars--they both had their period of glory when they brought something new to filmgoers, frankly innovating more substantially than Marvel did (with James Bond inventing the modern action film and its franchising and marketing, while Star Wars imported the whole technique to Hollywood and polished it to a high sheen as it showed how to blend it with the mythic, with nostalgia and with more out-of-this-world science fiction, revolutionized special effects, and delivered an unprecedented A-grade space opera). After their glory days those franchises went on putting out movies, and making money, at times they even made some of their newer iterations an "event" (certainly Goldeneye was and Casino Royale was and especially the fiftieth anniversary film Skyfall was, certainly the Star Wars prequels and even Episode VII were) and reaped the benefit at the box office, but they were never as innovative again, or as important again.

Looking back it isn't hard to understand why. Franchises are prisoners of their own past successes. Innovate too little and it's just more of the same. Innovate too much and it's not the old franchise anymore and you alienate those who cared about the franchise before. (I, for one, consider George Lucas' prequel trilogy to have been an honorable attempt to not give us more of the same, in his prequels offering the more information-heavy, political, "grown-up" narrative one sees in his early scripts for Star Wars before he committed to the mythic-fairy tale route, in the films' use of Computer-Generated Imagery, but we all know that the fans didn't love it as much as the original, and that some never forgave it.) And in any case it all feels unnecessary. And so the best thing is to not be a prisoner of a franchise's past successes by letting a franchise go. But it is hard to picture anything more contrary to the instincts of the C-suite-occupying vulgarians of Hollywood, who have under pressure doubled down on their already ever more unhinged commitment to franchises, with the occasional Spider-Man or Deadpool making them cling all the harder even as so many of their other films hemorrhage cash they can ill afford to lose. That said the next best course would be to bet on their strongest successes, and where trying to be fresher, seriously attempt to make what a large audience might really want to see. They did it with Spider-Man, did it with Shawn Ryan's Deadpool, the latter a mix of targeted and mass hit that pleased the very devoted base that paid off big. But there aren't likely to be three billion-dollar hits a year in that approach--which means the fantasy of somehow bringing back the ever more distant success of Phase Three will endure and continue to drive the thinking behind the franchise for as long as the few successes sufficiently compensate for the disappointments and the money-losers to sustain them in their resistance to change.