Is Marvel Falling Off?
This is what many fans and critics now to wonder. A thought that 5 years ago would have been seen as ludicrous.
From 2012 to 2022, the highest grossing film world wide was a Marvel movie more than four times. They routinely had movies in the top three in years they didn’t win with decent to high ratings.Recently, however, they have been struggling. Projects have failed to meet their expectations like Antman Quantomania and Black Widow. Marvel has had their first box office bomb with The Marvels.
Some of this can be explained by the Disney Plus push of TV Shows negatively impacting their movies. In The Marvels, only Captain Marvel had been in a movie. The other two leads were introduced only in their own shows. However, this can also be explained by current Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies not having a clear direction.
Throughout the 2010’s, everything Marvel made lead to Endgame; and every following movie plot point and character were made relevant for Endgame. However since then, many Marvel projects have felt directionless. As if their shows or movies won’t be mentioned again in a later project.
The shows have struggled to gain a large audience. Outside of Loki which debuted to 10.9 Million viewers, many of the shows have flopped compared to their budgets spent on them. They’ve also already had to recalibrate, replacing the character Kang the Conqueror with Doctor Doom due to Jonathan Majors conviction. They brought back actor Robert Downey Jr as Doctor Doom, which was met with confusion and ridicule from fans and critics alike.
In response to these losses, Bob Iger (CEO of Disney which owns Marvel) said in an interview that Marvel was reducing volume to improve their films. This response may have worked. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 made over 800 million at the box office while Deadpool and Wolverine made over 1.3 Billion.
