The decline of Marvel

[Frank Cox]

Interesting (and long) article about Marvel.

https://variety.com/2023/film/featur...ng-1235774940/

[Marcel Birgelen]

Let's one-up this with the "tl;dr version" of the Decline of Disney:

[Leo Enticknap]

A somewhat polarizing take on the Variety piece...

I am not endorsing everything he writes, but as a wind-up merchant I find that John Nolte is often good for a giggle.

[Jon Dent]

It's interesting how everyone is finally starting to realize jus how much damage the push for streaming content has created, and nobody has shot themselves in the foot worse than Disney. Prior to 'Phase 4' you'd get one, maybe two movies a year at most, with TV shows as an afterthought (nice to flesh things out, not needed to understand main thread). Now it's damn near impossible to keep up, with four different multi episode series on top of multiple movies a year. I haven't had time for any of the TV shows, and of the movies, only Shang-Chi and Guardians 3 had any merit to them (IMHO). Marvel has definitely lost their focus.

[Randy Stankey]

There's only so much you can do with superhero stories and they've finally exhausted all the possible plots.

Take Superman for instance. (I know he's not a Marvel character.)
Superman flies around and fights bad guys. His love interest is Lois Lane. His boss is Perry White and his friend is Jimmy Olson. How many times can Superman save the world from Lex Luthor before all the possible plot gimmicks are used up? Isn't there a saying that there are only seven basic plot lines for all movies? How many movies can there be before Superman has fought every bad guy?

Okay, so there are more characters in the Marvel Universe to make movies about but, like Superman, you can only make so many movies before you've done everything. Special effects and CGI can only get you so far. Before long, the only thing left to do is to rehash old plots.

I agree that streaming and alternative forms of storytelling are diluting the pool, so to speak but, at the basic level, I think that Marvel moves are becoming old news because there isn't much more that you can do in a superhero movie that hasn't already been done a thousand times.

[Mike Blakesley]

This is yet another example of something I suspected would happen, but all the highly paid "suits" couldn't see it coming. The standard entertainment consumer hasn't got time to keep up with something as complicated as the MCU. Not only do you have 30 movies, but you have untold numbers of TV shows, comic books, etc. and it only takes so many instances of "Oh, you must not have seen 'Movie XYZ,' it had all those details in it" before you get sick of playing catch-up. That's what happened to me when it comes to Marvel. I finally got to where I couldn't follow the stories, so I just said screw it and cut my losses.

The other problem, which I've alluded to in past posts, is every movie now is always about saving the universe, or at the very minimum, saving the planet. This is fine, but in reality nobody can relate to this. "I'm going to save the planet" has become a cliche phrase that is really meaningless. ("I'm recycling this soda bottle....to save the planet.") If you think about the Christopher Reeve "Superman" movies, sure they had super antics in them, but they were always really about something very simple, such as saving Lois Lane, or keeping 3 bad Kryptonians from taking over the government. And you didn't need to have seen movie A to understand Movie B.

... and even those movies eventually fell prey to the same thing that's happening to Marvel right now, namely, people started going "What, another Superman movie?!"

It's very hard to make lightning strike in the same place twice, especially when your idea of lighting is a 30-movie series with a bunch of interconnected TV shows thrown in.

Hey Marvel: Here's an idea. Scale back your grand ambitions. How about this: Make an easy to understand, stand-alone movie that's really well written and see how that goes?

[Frank Angel]

Nothing lasts forever.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The Marvel MCU movies started out with one or maybe two a year. They kept ramping it up, because people would eat it up. Then they started the shows on Netflix, later on Disney+... They all connected them with each orher in such way, you surely didn't want to miss a single thing... Meanwhile, some of those suits thought it would be the perfect vehicle to inject some self-righteous virtue signalling into everything they churned out, because that surely is what people want to hear all the time...

A new movie used to be an event, something a lot of fans could live up to. But those suits, they wanted more and more. They oversaturated the market to such extend, that most people became sick and tired from only looking at the trailers... ANOTHER Marvel movie? STOP IT, please!! Meanwhile, the executives blinded by pure greed, they just kept pumping...Eventually they pumped the cow so dry, the resulting vacuum became so densely void, it now imploded into it's own little black hole. That blackhole is growing stronger, the suckage can be felt from light years away and is not only sucking the MCU into the hole, it's sucking the multiverse right with it... actually, it's getting so strong, it will suck up DC and Universal's "Dark Universe" too if not being stopped.

[Frank Cox]

From Screendollars:

THE MARVELS is the 33rd movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and, unfortunately, it produced the lowest opening weekend box office of them all. On the bright side, what a run it has been for Marvel since IRON MAN crashed on the scene in 2008. All 32 MCU movies to this point have grossed $11.7B in domestic box office.

Going forward, the most formidable challenge for Disney, Warner Bros. or any other studio making a superhero movie is to create them on a reasonable budget, so that they have a chance to break even with something less than a mega-blockbuster response from audiences. THE MARVELS cost $275M to produce, and will certainly not generate the $700M in worldwide box office that would be necessary to turn a profit.

[Brad Miller]

None of this is surprising at all. These superhero movies are just regurgitated garbage. I stopped giving a flip about them several years ago when it became the same shit over and over, all plagued with nonstop animated CG. These days the moment I learn a movie has a superhero in it I instantly become disinterested. No thank you, that's a hard pass. I didn't even bother watching the last 2 Star Wars movies. It became boring because it was trying so hard.

Regarding streaming, we all saw what happened when film was kicked out of the cinemas and everyone switched to digital. Suddenly any talent-less hack could make his little video movie and run it at a theater because all that was required was to export it as a DCP. There was no cost to making a film print. And let's face it, most all of that is pure waste of time garbage. The SAME thing is happening to streaming, where the streaming companies are becoming so desperate for "content" that they are green lighting any quick bit of poo they can get their hands on. And the short theatrical windows WILL ABSOLUTELY end with the studios making much less money overall on each movie than had they respected the theatrical windows, but streaming windows are just going to continue to make things worse to the point theaters start to fold, and then the studios will lose even more money overall.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Regarding streaming, we all saw what happened when film was kicked out of the cinemas and everyone switched to digital. Suddenly any talent-less hack could make his little video movie and run it at a theater because all that was required was to export it as a DCP. There was no cost to making a film print. And let's face it, most all of that is pure waste of time garbage. The SAME thing is happening to streaming, where the streaming companies are becoming so desperate for "content" that they are green lighting any quick bit of poo they can get their hands on. And the short theatrical windows WILL ABSOLUTELY end with the studios making much less money overall on each movie than had they respected the theatrical windows, but streaming windows are just going to continue to make things worse to the point theaters start to fold, and then the studios will lose even more money overall.

The interesting thing is that movies haven't become less expensive due to the advent of digital production techniques, quite to the contrary.

They apparently spent $275M dollar on the latest "The Marvels" movie. Corrected for inflation, that would be about $125M in 1991, the same year T2 was released at a cost of roughtly $100M and that was the most expensive movie ever made until Cameron took the crown with Titanic a few years later. T2 also ended up as the highest grossing movie of 1991.

I can only conclude that many of those highly paid Disney execs are just complete idiots and it's probably not much better over at Warner Brothers. Look at whom they hired to direct this $275M production? Nia Da Costa... Yeah, she may have checked all the boxes on the "Inclusivity Chart", but check the other credentials:

- Experience with big budget productions: none
- Experience managing multi-million movie stars: none
- Experience with any kind of blockbuster movie: none
- Experience with any kind of superhero movie: none

Maybe she is a wonderful director, but in order to be able to pull such a project, you need to be more than just a movie director, you need to be one of the best all-rounders in the business, you need to be able to manage people, expectations and money.

Would you give such a high-stakes project to the next rookie that came along and maybe made one or two well received experimental films on a shoestring budget?

Maybe George Lucas didn't have any real experience managing a blockbuster movie when he first created Star Wars, but that project started already as a potential tax writeoff and Lucas had so much skin in the game, he made sure he became the manager he needed to be. Also, he still had Francis Ford Coppola to fall back on...

What digital may have brought is the idea that now, everything can be fixed in post. That bad storywriting and poor planning at earlier stages of execution can easily be fixed afterwards. I've heard horror stories akin to what I used to hear for software and game development. Uninformed, incompetent managers that start to demand changes after they realized what they'd actually had greenlit before. The "shoot first", think later mentality. I've read an interesting anecdote regarding the failed She-Hulk Marvel TV series, where they had scheduled the effects for the transformation from "she" to "Hulk" to be in a later episode, but then someone decided that this was no good and should be in the very pilot. Obviously, the entire scene wasn't ready, so one pitty effect studio got the regrettable task of creating this scene in a hurry, with the limited material there was. The end result was some laughably bad quality CGI, a lot of extra costs and a shitty end product.

Those cases seem to add up. Shoddy writing, a never ending stream of changes and stories that are created by comittee rather than by creative, professional writers, overworked VFX teams, constant reshoots... They have ballooned the budgets and severely impacted the quality of the end product.

Maybe the difference between digital and analog is the mindset. Just remember the time of the Kodachrome film in your photo camera. There were just a limited number of shots on your roll of film, so you took far more care about compositing your shot correctly. Nowadays, you just point and click your iPhone, whicch doesn't just take a single picture, but a dozen or even more and already automatically selects what the phone thinks is the best from the bunch. Digital is far less tangible and therein may be hidden part of the problem. A digital picture is such an intermediate, if we don't like it, we can easily fix it in post production. Too many movies are also shot this way. Don't bother about the details now, we'll fix it in post...

[Mike Blakesley]

Nia Da Costa... Yeah, she may have checked all the boxes on the "Inclusivity Chart", but check the other credentials:

- Experience with big budget productions: none
- Experience managing multi-million movie stars: none
- Experience with any kind of blockbuster movie: none
- Experience with any kind of superhero movie: none

This is going to lead to ridiculous conversations like:

Suit #1: We've got this new movie, and Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese are all on board to direct. We just have to choose who to give it to.
Suit #2: Well, I think we should use Nia DaCosta.
Suit #1: But she has no experience.
Suit #2: Quit being such a sexist.

[Marcel Birgelen]

This is going to lead to ridiculous conversations like:

Suit #1: We've got this new movie, and Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese are all on board to direct. We just have to choose who to give it to.
Suit #2: Well, I think we should use Nia DaCosta.
Suit #1: But she has no experience.
Suit #2: Quit being such a sexist.

I've had those kind of discussions and you need to be damn careful what you say, which, in itself, is already wrong. It's like everybody, at their convenience, is suddenly a suggary snowflake that can't handle the truth...

I don't care about the color of your skin, your gender, your religion, your politics, what you do when you're not at work, as long as you keep those things within the law and keep them personal. But anything you say nowadays can be pulled out of context and mutilated at will and can and be used against you, relevant or not... This kind of toxic culture seems to be what's slowly killing Disney from the inside.

[Lyle Romer]

I've had those kind of discussions and you need to be damn careful what you say, which, in itself, is already wrong. It's like everybody, at their convenience, is suddenly a suggary snowflake that can't handle the truth...

I don't care about the color of your skin, your gender, your religion, your politics, what you do when you're not at work, as long as you keep those things within the law and keep them personal. But anything you say nowadays can be pulled out of context and mutilated at will and can and be used against you, relevant or not... This kind of toxic culture seems to be what's slowly killing Disney from the inside.

It's slowly killing a lot more than Disney!

[Jon Dent]

The fact that Da Costa hadn't done any 'tentpole' pictures before follows a similar pattern with many, many other Marvel movies. Scott Derrickson was a small time horror director before he did Doctor Strange, Chloe Zhao was an indie darling, hell even Jon Favreau was known as a comedy guy before Iron Man. Marvel feels like an enormous machine where in many cases the director is almost an afterthought, brought in to add an element to the machine, not run it (unless you're James Gunn). There's a lot of safety rails for directors on Marvel projects, and I doubt it's ever in question who ultimately runs the show. But those same safety rails also lead to huge overhead, departments running on autopilot, lack of planning, miscommunication, last minute changes, etc etc.

Add to that the need to feed the beast that is streaming (and boy are studios finally beginning to grasp how badly they fucked up there) and you have a recipe for a large, expensive machine that is burned out and just going through the motions.