I wasn’t an MCU fan from the get-go. And I am still not a fanboy. I was a Marvel kid, but I was far, far more interested in Spider-Man and the X-Men than in the Avengers. But the MCU earned my respect and many of my dollars over the years (although there are several MCU movies I still haven’t seen).
The MCU was solid from the start. Things picked up in Phase Two. Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy are two of the five best MCU movies. Things really picked up with Phase Three. Not because of the quality of the movies, or just because of the quality of the movies, but because those movies complemented each other, building to something big. Three dozen movies culminated in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. The MCU pulled off what all its imitators would fail at. The end result was a cultural event and accomplished something no one movie could.
So don’t get me wrong. I don’t want the MCU Phase 4 to fail. It’s just that I am quite confident that it will. There are things Marvel can do in response, although saving the future of the MCU may leave something that doesn’t look that much like the MCU Phase 4 recently announced.
SPOILERS for Endgame below.
First off, why it will fail:
Superhero fatigue. Everyone is just waiting for the superhero bubble to burst. Make money while you can, sure, but no one thinks it will last forever. It has been 11 years since Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. 19 years since X-Men. The sword and sorcery boom only lasted 9 years (Conan the Barbarian and Beastmaster in 1982 to Beastmaster 2 in 1991). Marvel is living on borrowed time—three more years might be too long.
Endgame provided a natural exit. There are hardcore Avengers fans and then there are a lot more people who were just along for the ride. Batman or X-Men fans who saw greener grass on the other side. People who were never superhero fans who got sold on the grand Thanos arc. Some, many probably, are MCU fans for life. A lot of others enjoyed the ride but are ready to move onto other things. Now is the perfect time.
Loss of marquee names. The biggest stars of the first three phases of the MCU, Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans, are gone. Scarlett Johansson will be gone after the standalone Black Widow movie. Star power matters in Hollywood and the MCU suddenly has less of it.
Bad timing. Speaking of the Black Widow movie, the MCU powers-that-be royally screwed it by slotting it after Endgame. The Black Widow is dead; nobody cares anymore. How does this make Johansson feel after she kicked major ass in movie after movie? And after they gave Captain Marvel a huge gift with the mid-Infinity War and Endgame slot.
The replacement players. Anthony Mackie and Natalie Portman are great. Everybody knows they were not the original choice to play Captain America and Thor. (Although we don’t know that Hemsworth won’t be sticking around.)
The China syndrome. China and other foreign countries have become hugely important to blockbuster movies. They need that audience. The risk is that movies become so dumbed down (for an audience with a different cultural context and limited English skills) and watered down (for Chinese censors) that American audiences jump ship.
Increasingly esoteric properties. I only very recently heard of The Eternals. I just heard of Shang-Chi two days ago. The first Doctor Strange movie was solidly in the bottom half of the MCU, box office-wise. The MCU did it with Guardians of the Galaxy. That doesn’t mean every esoteric property will work.
Too much TV. The MCU conquered movies. It did something no would-be cinematic universe could pull off. That doesn’t mean the MCU can do the same to TV. Different medium, different demands. 5 of the 11 projects announced are TV shows.
SJW Malarkey. Thus far, the MCU has mostly talked a big game. Just enough to keep away the virtual lynch mobs, appeal to normies, and attract the ire of useful idiots, without ever actually veering from a commitment to entertainment. Which makes it easy to think you can get away with taking that next step and switching from making entertainment to making boring propaganda tracts.
Hubris. How else do the great fall? Studio execs, flush with cash, start paying a little less attention. Or, worse, they start paying too much attention. Pull off enough stuff people thought you couldn’t and you’ll get to thinking you can pull off anything. You start making movies for yourself instead of for the public.
What Marvel should do about it:
Lean into what works. Something will replace the superhero bubble. It remains to be seen what that is. One possibility is space fantasy (although Valerian and the Star Wars revival’s struggles might suggest otherwise). If so, the MCU is already leaning in with the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Thor: Ragnarok, and Infinity War/Endgame. But best keep your head on a swivel.
Treat Spider-Man like a marquee superhero. Tom Holland is a great Spider-Man and a great Peter Parker (caveat: I haven’t seen Far From Home). But I can’t help but feel that the MCU powers-that-be are a little worried about Spider-Man overshadowing the rest of the MCU. So he gets his tech from Tony Stark instead of inventing it himself. He is pulled away from New York as much as possible. Bad move. Spider-Man is a marquee hero: treat him like one.
Give X-Men a hard reboot. I think we can all agree that the X-Men franchise launched in 2000 is good and dead after Dark Phoenix (caveat: another movie I haven’t seen). It was a good run, if one overshadowed by the MCU. Now that the rights to the X-Men are back together with the rights to the Avengers, studio execs might be tempted to just keep the X-Men out of the Avengers way. Word I hear is that Marvel has been undercutting the X-Men comics since the MCU took off. This is the wrong approach. Like Spider-Man, the X-Men are a marquee property. It is time for a hard reboot, yes (although maybe keep around Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool and Josh Brolin’s Cable). But definitely bring them back in a big way and don’t worry about stepping on the Avengers’ toes to do it.
And if all this doesn’t work, well, Disney has all of those other properties . . .
Every Day Should Be Tuesday 
I lost interest after the 3rd Thor movie but I admit I’m curious to see just how much farther they can go. You’re advice sounds good; let’s see if they take it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Interesting. I think they will have a hard time doing that with Spiderman though, since it is a property owned by Sony.
Also, I never thought I’d live to see Thor/Dr. Strange/a few other characters become, well… huge. ANYWAY, I think your points are super valid, though I just wanted to say Marvel/Disney has an amazing ability to make… everything marquee… it’s weird.
LikeLike
Once I watch, and buy, Infinity War and Engame, I’ll be done with superhero movies. I flipping tired of them and I grew up with comics in the 90’s…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree with you on some counts, and disagree on others.
On the one hand, yeah, if they lean full on into the “Multiverse” thing, I can see things easily becoming a mess. Into the Spider-Verse was able to pull it off, however, but that was its own thing with its own super-cool style. Likewise, even if Disney+ makes a ton of money, I kind of doubt the TV shows there are gonna have any effect on the movies as a whole– See: Agents of SHIELD, all those Netflix shows, Inhumans, etc.
And Eternals is an … odd choice. Like, at least Guardians of the Galaxy had more history as a comic book, y’know? Plus, “Space Opera, just with a 70’s soundtrack” is a lot easier to wrap one’s head around than … whatever the hell the Eternals are about.
On the other hand, cries of “SJW Malarkey” aren’t helping the conversation any. Yeah, the “Gurl Power!” shot in Endgame was a bit shoehorned in, and Captain Marvel didn’t get enough to do … buuuuut on the other hand movies like Wonder Woman and Black Panther made TONS of money, so making movies about people who aren’t generic white guys named Chris is just a good business decision.
Plus, Shang-Chi has the potential to be AWESOME. It’s “Marvel does a Kung Fu Movie.” What’s not to love about that?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Like I said, I don’t have any real problem with what they’ve done thus far. The feminism of Captain Marvel enhanced the movie (if slightly less than that of Wonder Woman and dramatically less than that of Mad Max: Fury Road). The wild success of Black Panther showed audiences are responding, and crazy-ass Afrofuturism can provide plentiful grist.
I just think there is a fine line between something good for the movies (as a matter of storytelling and as a matter of marketing) and something that could badly hurt them. To point to another Disney property, it helped Rey’s storyline in The Force Awakens and badly hurt Poe and Finn’s in The Last Jedi.
LikeLike
And I’m all for the weird stuff working out, I just wouldn’t bet on it.
LikeLike
“so making movies about people who aren’t generic white guys named Chris is just a good business decision.”
Depends if they are good movies. I think people are less concerned with “race swaping” than shoe horning in a woman as “thor” for no reason.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: July 2019 Month-in-Review | Every Day Should Be Tuesday
Agree with a lot of what you say, HP. Biggest thing for me is the fatigue. I think Infinity War was the high point, and I don’t see it going up again from where it’s at now.
Though I could stand a few more seasons of Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, if that got picked back up.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah. I mean, I am very happy with the last several years of the MCU, but if they just stopped making movies I would be completely okay with that. I’m about worn out and ready for something else.
LikeLiked by 1 person
All solid reasons.. but I think the biggest is, as you said, the ENDGAME exit. ENDGAME felt like a TV series finale. PHASE 4 feels like an attempt to reboot the series after people have moved on. And it’s like “wait, we had the finale already.. what is this still doing on?”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Too late. SJW are already eying this. They want more representations even though they hate comic books and hate superheros.
They will not rest until every character is gay or trans.
Why would I want to see pay to see that trash. SJW are a small population an they are broke and they do not invest money.
They are using obscure characters that no one cares about.
GO WOKE GO BROKE
LikeLike
Pingback: December 2019 Month-in-Review and Year-in-Review | Every Day Should Be Tuesday
Just discovered this blog and this post.
This is an old post but I think it deserves a comment this late because of how the health emergency (or panic) has affected the Disney/ MCU Phase IV schedule. Black Widow was pushed back to the Fall of 2020 and the other announced movies are obviously later. Apparently there has only been much work done so far on Black Widow, which was complete and being advertised, and the Eternals. Black Widow is a prequel apparently set some time between Civil War and Infinity War.
Now the delays are being discussed, but people are missing one aspect. As your post noted, Endgame already felt like a finale and was marketed as such. Endgame came out in April 2019 and Far From Home right after. Black Widow, the prequel set before Endgame, will be the only MCU movie released in the two years after Endgame/ Far From Home. Look, if fans weren’t already treating Endgame as the final movie in the MCU before this, they certainly will be if there are two years before the next movie in the “series”.
My own opinion is that the MCU jumped the shark with the post-credits scene in Infinity War, and artistically, Infinity War should have been the finale. But for commercial reasons, Endgame was the finale and most importantly, fans and moviegoers will see Endgame as the finale. MCU fans will have lost interest and potential new audiences will not care about tie ins for what will be regarded as an old series. Now there will still be interest in movies featuring some of the Marvel superheroes (though superhero fatigue is definitely happening), but there won’t be interest in the continuity. You could put Ironman in a Fantastic Four movie but there is no need for him to be the MCU Ironman and it probably would work better for the character not to be the MCU Ironman.
So what should Marvel Studios do? Declare victory and stop making MCU movies. Release Black Widow, which will take its place with the 23 others and it coming out too late will be fine since if its good people will buy the DVD to add to their collections. Tell the crew working on the new Thor movie that it need not have, and should not have, any continuity with the MCU movies but should work as a standalone, which Waititi (sp?) should be able to handle. Cancel the new Dr. Strange movie, which has production problems anyway, you can recycle the Enternals into part of a Fantastic Four series, and there is no reason the kung fu movie has to be MCU other than marketing. They still have to produce a Spiderman movie for Sony with the new agreement and that is the only complication I see. If you want to do the Avengers in another decade it would be a reboot for new audiences.
LikeLike