(I wrote this essay over the course of an hour last night when I had time to kill. The Wi-Fi in my area was cut out, so some parts might not be completely accurate. What follows is my best attempt to explain if Marvel Studios is doomed or not.)
Is Marvel Studios Doomed?
Answer: It’s complicated.
The MCU wasn’t always planned to be what it was today. It was originally a bunch of separate superhero movies detailing the origins of Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, and Thor. The plan was that, if the first five films did well, then maybe they could cross them all over for the first ever Avengers film.
And they did. And it worked so well that Marvel decided to expand. Adapting more comics storylines, they introduced characters like Falcon and the Winter Soldier into the mix, as well as a 7 season show about the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. Feeling confident, Marvel adapted the little-known team of the Guardians of the Galaxy into a film, which became a huge hit. They soon added Ant-Man, the Wasp, Vision, Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver into the mix, while also creating villains like Yellowjacket, Ultron, Ronan, Alexander Pierce, and Malekith. They also created several shows about street-level heroes like Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist, who crossed over in the Defenders team-up. Naturally, with all these successes, there was bound to be a flop, and so came about Inhumans. The show was quickly cancelled, and was therefore little more than a footnote in the cinematic universe that was slowly being crafted. Marvel continued on, undisturbed.
Marvel decided to expand. In 2016, they broke up the Avengers with Captain America: Civil War, a movie which had wide-reaching repercussions for the rest of the MCU to come. They continued to introduce a flood of new characters, such as Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Mantis, Captain Marvel, and Valkyrie, and new villains like Ego, Killmonger, Dormammu, Hela, and the Vulture. Perhaps the most important character to them, however, was Spider-Man, whom they had recently made a deal about with Sony to use in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Soon, Marvel released Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame to incredible success. This success came at a great cost, however, as they had killed off several characters in the process, such as Black Widow, Captain America, Gamora, Loki, Vision, and Iron Man. Several of these deaths, Marvel would soon come to regret, leading to the resurrections of half of these characters in later installments.
After the ridiculous financial success of Phases 1, 2, and 3, Marvel broadened their reach to include more franchises, more heroes, and more moneymaking movies. And it worked, at first. Despite Black Widow not making anything at the box office due to the pandemic, TV shows like Loki, WandaVision, and What If…? became household names. Spider-Man: No Way Home was practically perfect, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was beautiful, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was heartbreaking, and Moon Knight was wonderfully psychedelic. Several of Marvel’s other products, however, left much to be desired.
Marvel’s strategy to continue the success of the Infinity Saga hinged on one strategy: to keep making movies the same way as before. This strategy became known as the “Marvel mold”, and it was because of this mold that films that broke it (i.e. Deadpool and Wolverine, No Way Home, Shang-Chi) were especially well recieved.
While Marvel’s movies mostly stayed within the mold, its TV shows broke it completely. The shows explored complex concepts and emotions such as grief, abuse, guilt, revenge, hope, loyalty, and love, and broke barriers for Marvel in the process.
Marvel’s movies during Phases 4 and 5 were largely hit-or-miss. While the only truly inadequate Infinity Saga movies were The Incredible Hulk and (debatably) Thor: The Dark World, Marvel was unable to hack it with Eternals, completely lost their sense of place with Love and Thunder, failed to regain that sense with The Marvels, and churned out a series of inadequate Marvel mold-like finales for otherwise great shows, such as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Ms. Marvel, which finally culminated in the first huge Marvel failure.
Secret Invasion, a show which subverted everything Marvel had done up until that point, somehow managed to kill off Maria Hill, invalidate Rhodey’s character arc during Endgame and onwards, and destroy everything that made Skrulls redeemable, all in one fell swoop. For the first time, Marvel had actually done something truly terrible, and everyone knew it.
Marvel began to realize that they were facing a problem, and so sought to solve it using a weapon of their own creation: the post-credits teaser. Trying to create as many plotlines as they could to continue audience interest, Marvel ended up leaving two-thirds of post-credits scenes from Phases 4 and 5 left completely unresolved. Leaving ridiculously high amounts of dangling plot threads with characters like Venom, Eros, Clea, Jake Lockley, and Hercules, Marvel painted themselves into a corner as the unattended plot threads started to box them (and their future stories) in.
Of course, despite their shortcomings, Marvel was still a huge financial success. They had bought the rights to the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Blade, and they were bigger than ever. Even if some movies didn’t meet box-office standards, Marvel was still a huge company gaining mountains of profit all the time. As long as the studio kept releasing new content, the fans would be satisfied.
Or so the studio thought.
In reality, Marvel Studios had lost its spot as a household name, and Disney was still billions of dollars in debt. The studio’s movies were dismissed as passing thoughts rather than the cinematic events they used to be, and they were primarily remembered for the Infinity Saga and not much else. They had nowhere to go, so they turned back to their greatest success: Endgame.
Marvel decided to continue on the “let’s just do what we did last time” tradition, creating a two-part finale for the “Multiverse Saga”: Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, with both films directed yet again by the Russo Brothers. While using Loki and Quantumania to set up Kang the Conquerer as an admittedly perfect villain for the story they were trying to tell, Kang’s actor, Jonathan Majors, was jailed and fired from his job at Marvel Studios. Rather than recast Kang, Marvel decided to take a different direction and reroute the entire phase to set up Doctor Doom as the main antagonist.
Just a couple months ago, Robert Downey Jr. was announced as Doctor Doom, and Chris Evans was cast in an undisclosed role. This, combined with the very nature of the multiverse, creates an issue that Marvel Comics has faced for years:
Nobody stays dead.
Sure, characters die. They’re stabbed through the chest, or maybe choked. Maybe they fall screaming into a black hole, or maybe they were shot in the heart in dramatic slow-motion. Heck, they might even die of old age. Whatever the case, these characters just can’t stay dead. It’s a problem that Marvel Comics continues to have, and one that the MCU is starting to adopt.
Phil Coulson was resurrected in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. after his apparent death in The Avengers at the hands of Loki, marking the first time in the MCU that a character was brought back to life after their actual, real death.
It wouldn’t be the last.
In WandaVision, Vision was brought back in the body of White Vision. He attacked Soul Vision before leaving Westview, and will reappear in the as-of-yet-unnamed series Vision Quest. Gamora died after being sacrificed by Thanos during the Infinity War, but a variant of her from 2014 was brought into Earth-616 during Endgame, while the exact same happened for Thanos after his death early on in Endgame. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Bucky fell off a train in The First Avenger. Nick Fury was shot in The Winter Soldier. Half of all MCU characters died in Infinity War and were later resurrected in Endgame. Zeus was brought back in Love and Thunder. Red Skull was revealed to have survived being blasted into space by the Tesseract in Infinity War. Darren Cross returned as M.O.D.O.K.. Loki seemingly died several times before his permanent death at the hands of Thanos. However, that wasn’t the end, as an alternate version was brought back in Loki, and took control of the entire multiverse. The Ancient One is revealed in What If…? to be able to make herself an actual ghost if need be. Agatha Harkness became a real ghost. Billy Maximoff also became a ghost, and then used his ghost powers to put himself into the body of a teen who died. Then he did the exact same thing for his brother. Kingpin survived being shot in the eye. Thor and Marc Spector literally died twice.
And despite the amount of characters who died permanent deaths, there’s still a disturbingly high amount of characters who didn’t.
Maybe Robert Downey Jr. won’t be a Tony Stark variant. Maybe Chris Evans wasn’t cast as Steve Rogers. But it’s unlikely. Because, deep down, Marvel is starting to realize just how much trouble they’re in, and they’re continuing to reuse the old and rebrand it as the new as an attempt to salvage their profits.
The MCU isn’t doomed yet, though. They recently released the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, and they’ve had several other box office successes as well. And if they can still manage to pull off Doomsday and Secret Wars, they might have a chance of continuing what they want to do. But of all their faults, the biggest one is quite simple: they forgot their own lesson.
After 17 years, and enough shows and movies to fill twenty complete Wikipedia articles about different ways to catalogue the shows and movies, Marvel needs to relearn the lesson taught to them by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby so many decades ago: With great power must also come great responsibility.
