How Marvel sowed the seeds of its own demise and killed cinema in the process

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe has straddled cinema invincibly for 15 years – but today, should you lift your nostrils to the wind, you might detect a faint whiff of kryptonite.

The latest instalment in this $26-billion-grossing media franchise, titled The Marvels, opened around the world last weekend, and the reception has been distinctly un-super.

Iman Vellani (left) as Ms Marvel, Brie Larson as Captain Marvel, and Teyonah Parris as Captain Monica Rambeau in The Marvels, which has clocked up unimpressive audience numbers.Credit: Marvel

The second standalone adventure for Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, which teams the B-tier Avenger with two allies from recent Disney+ series, took just $US47 million ($73 million) in the United States: the lowest opening weekend of any MCU film to date. (The original Captain Marvel opened with more than three times that sum in 2019.) In Australia, The Marvels took in $2.9 million, which makes its opening weekend, according to Numero box office figures, the third lowest of 33 movies that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has produced in the 15 years of the MCU.

Turn to YouTube for answers – rarely a wise idea – and you’ll be told The Marvels bombed due to wokeness. Female star, female sidekicks, racial diversity, no blokes (aside from Samuel L Jackson; a constant): it’s all an affront to the faithful male millennials who underpinned the MCU’s early success.

Trouble is, the data don’t bear it out. In the MCU’s immediately pre-COVID heyday, its audience was almost exactly gender-balanced (it skewed 55 per cent male, on average) and also notably young (40 per cent were under 25). The Marvels, however, drew a predominantly (61 per cent) male crowd over the weekend, of which just 19 per cent came from the coveted Gen-Z 18-24 age bracket. (And apparently teenagers couldn’t care less: just 7 per cent were 13-17s.) In other words, the rump of diehards are the same male millennials they always were. So if Marvel isn’t suddenly floundering over wokeness, why is it stumbling now?

The truth is, the series sowed the seeds of its own destruction 15 years ago: the roots just happened to choke its rivals first. By the end of its first four-year streak – Phase One, in MCU terms – the model had become so successful that every rival studio had dropped what they were doing and were scrambling to copy it. It turned apparently worthless intellectual properties – what ordinary person cared about Iron Man, Thor and Captain America? – into goldmines.

Suddenly apparently worthless intellectual properties became goldmines.

It was building its own stable of movie stars, both rehabilitated (Robert Downey Jr) and newly minted (the Chrises: Evans, Pratt and Hemsworth). And it was a massive, perpetual trailer for itself, with each instalment firing fans’ enthusiasm for the next. Barring the initial dip from Iron Man to The Incredible Hulk, every solo film made more than the last – while the first team-up, The Avengers, became the highest-grossing film Disney had then ever released.

Marvel’s formula became known as the Cinematic Universe model, and was like nothing Hollywood had previously seen. And the recipe ran as follows. Take a pre-existing pop culture franchise with built-in nostalgic appeal. Make the individual films interconnected, rather than just successive chapters in a sequence. Make lots of them – more than one each year on that initial four-year run, rising to three annually, plus streaming series. And shape them to the tastes of the widest possible global audience with nothing to goad social media or enrage Chinese censors.

Soon enough, four rival Cinematic Universes were whirring away. Disney themselves applied the Marvel rules to Star Wars, which they acquired from Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in 2012, the year of The Avengers’s release. Warner Bros fast-tracked one into existence for their own DC Comics brand, hitting the first team-up (2017’s Justice League, featuring Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman) in three years. Sony had a grab-bag of Spider-Man villains on their books, like Venom and Morbius, so a Sony Spider-Man Universe got underway too. And New Line got a horror version up and running, in which popular ghouls from The Conjuring series – a haunted doll called Annabelle, a spectral nun – could peel off and terrorise ad hoc.

Then there were the failures, smouldering by the roadside as the zeitgeist tore past. Universal’s Dark Universe, a revival of the studio’s portfolio of classic monsters from the 1930s, was abandoned after a single film, 2017’s poorly received, Tom Cruise-led reboot of The Mummy. And Paramount tried – still are trying – to weld its Hasbro action-figure properties into a sort of Toys-R-Us-verse, which puts GI Joe into the same world as Transformers (and M.A.S.K., Visionaries and Micronauts).

Disney applied the Marvel formula to Star Wars: Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) in Star Wars: Ahsoka.Credit: Lucasfilm

Yet Hollywood ignored the second law of movie-going thermodynamics: even the most stable Cinematic Universe will eventually collapse in on itself. First, running costs keep rocketing upwards, as constant reshoots and last-minute reworkings of visual effects are required to keep the broader plan on track. (It’s thought that The Marvels cost Disney $275 million; Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, with its teeming cast and epic, devastating battles, may have been made for $70 million less.)

The fixed house style also becomes an issue: what was fun and glossy a generation ago now feels desperately dated. (Think how often the conventional long-running series, like Bond, Batman and Star Trek, try out different looks and tones.) Joining the stable of stars holds less appeal too, as actors’ multi-film contracts become career-stranglers. Brie Larson won the Best Actress Oscar in 2015, and was cast in Captain Marvel the following year. And since the release of that film, she has appeared in a total of two non-Marvel ones: the legal drama Just Mercy and the tenth Fast & Furious.

Most devastating of all, though, is consumer fatigue. The Cinematic Universe model depends on customer appetite swelling in line with studio output – in other words, exactly against the tried-and-true laws of supply and demand.

The question posed by studios is: “How much more can we make?” As for “How much more can we take?” – who cares? Over at Star Wars, the streaming series keep coming. In the last four years, almost 40 hours of new viewing material have been pumped out: nearly twice as much as was made in the prior 42 years.

But Star Wars isn’t almost twice as beloved now as it was in 2019. Rather, its horizons have narrowed: there’s no role for imagination to play in Star Wars any more because the content glut instantly fills all the cracks.

It floods the market too. Eight of the 10 most commercially successful films released in the 1990s were either wholly original ideas or had been adapted from books. (The two exceptions were Star Wars: Episode I and The Lost World: Jurassic Park.) But by the end of the 2000s – the decade the franchises began to take over – the ratio had exactly reversed: all but two (Avatar and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone) were sequels.

And during the 2010s, when the Cinematic Universe model was in its pomp? Seven “universe” titles (five of which were Marvel), two ordinary sequels, and one remake. The first non-franchise film came 46th on the list, and that was Bohemian Rhapsody. The first original story? Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which by the end of the decade had fallen out of the top 50 entirely, outshone by such cultural lodestars as Aquaman, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Ice Age: Continental Drift.

What’s most striking about that top 50 is how extraordinarily boring it is – a toddler’s menu, with turkey dinosaurs every night of the week.

Has the death spiral begun, or is The Marvels’ failure merely a blip? The extraordinary success of Oppenheimer this summer – Nolan again – bodes well for audiences who want to be treated like adults.

Per TS Eliot, whimper rather than bang seems the likelier mode of decline. But the vanishing of 15 years of dominance overnight is a significant shift. Like westerns and musicals, two of Hollywood’s prior unhealthy fixations, the superhero film will survive. But as in both of those earlier cases, the genre’s new tragic aura may be hard to shift.

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