“Jonathan Majors’ assault case is getting Marvel bad press,” “James Gunn’s departure and the emergence of DCU has weakened the MCU,” or “The Marvels negated the good Loki did.” We can keep blaming a new point every time for Marvel’s speedy decline, but its ability to grab success and keep it for 10 long years is the kindling stoking up this particular fire.
After many failed attempts, Marvel found the beginning of the formally elusive fame with Iron Man in 2008 and it stuck around until Avengers: Endgame and Far From Home. Even the mild hiccups — The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World — did little to derail it. In fact, Endgame catapulted the MCU to unexpected heights and of course, the studio was going to be emboldened by this, motivated to take risks it feared to touch before.
But no one expected Marvel to lose its marbles and self-create a long list of issues diligently hollowing it out from within.
It gave up on logically connecting the dots or well, connecting them at all
The Nick Fury we met at the end of No Way Home was brimming with confidence, complete with his iconic eyepatch, completely chill, and working with Skrulls. But just mere months later (as per the MCU timeline) he was a dejected broken man in Secret Invasion, without his eyepatch. What new happened that shattered his bold exterior to that extent? Also, The Marvels see him on the space station sans a single Skrull in sight or his wife, who boards the ship with him at the end of the Marvel series.
We still don’t know if Kamala is an inhuman or a mutant; though her bangle now has a name and a twin their history remains unknown; events in The Eternals have had no repercussions so far, with a dead body of a giant eternal sticking out of the Indian Ocean somehow not getting noticed by the rest of the world; how does forgetting Peter but remembering Spider-Man work and why does Doctor Stranger remember helping the latter when it was the former sans the superhero suit who came asking for aid… should I go on?
Yes, it was not knowing what miracles Iron Man’s suits could do or the hell the Infinity Stones could unleash combined that made the revelations jaw-dropping. But if Tony’s suit suddenly changed into a turtleneck in his second appearance without any explanation, Thor became buddies with a revived Hela after she did her best to kill him, or if the Stones had just materialized into existence, you would have been scratching your head since Phase 1. Mysteries are good until their remaining unresolved makes sense.
Believing that fans’ existing faith in Marvel and star power can carry a project forward
I am not saying casting actors whose careers got the life they needed thanks to their Marvel roles is the only way to fix the MCU again. But only relying on big names to carry a project to success and/or depending on the trust fans have put in the fandom to ensure the victory of a half-baked storyline? The studio can cast all the Angelina Jolies, Christian Bales, and Gemma Chans it wants, but hoping to blind fans with all the glitter will only produce results if these exceptionally talented individuals play a well-written character in a properly penned script.
Incorrect methods of trying to impress Marvel comic book enthusiasts
Past Marvel projects also had hidden Easter eggs, comic book references, and arcs that accurately depicted particular comic book moments — the additional spice greatly appreciated and anticipated by comic book fans. So, the studio decided to take it up a notch — bombard such viewers with so many references and Easter eggs that they feel like teasers of things to come and then turn around to fulfill none of the apparent promises. I am still hung up on WandaVision hinting at Mephisto, Marvel’s very own version of the Devil, throughout the show, only to say “Hah! It was just Wanda all along.”
The result? Even the very obviously flaunted “X” in The Marvels trailer was met with skepticism — was the studio really going to usher in the X-Men or was it just another marketing ploy? It wasn’t but the shaky trust remains.
Success has made Marvel greedy — the studio believes quantity trumps quality
Brie Larson’s weird CGI face in space just before the other Earth portal closed on Monica, M.O.D.O.K.’s minion ass that had us reaching for a knife to gouge our eyes out, Doctor Starnge’s third eye; Jane’s painful one-liners in Thor: Love and Thunder and its plot’s drive to be a parody; The Marvels being nothing but a filler film with plot points haphazardly lumped together that seriously wasted its talented cast; the badly written villains of Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk; the need to scrap the halfway done Daredevil series and start it from scratch, and so many more blunders.
And the root cause? Marvel’s greed to pump out more content to cash in on the existing hype around the franchise without paying heed to how everything that made the MCU great is getting severely compromised in the process.
We can argue that superhero fatigue is the problem — and it is to some extent — but what we are really tired of is sub-par content being dumped on us with the confidence that Marvel’s golden past and its flashy presentations will successfully blind us. As a Marvel loyalist, I hope the studio doesn’t have to commit more mistakes to learn from them.
Jonathan Majors, James Gunn, or ‘The Marvels’ isn’t the problem — MCU’s success is
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