When entertainment becomes homework
Disney chose quantity over quality, and now the bill has come due.
There are some life events you never forget. Your wedding day. The birth of your first child. Your hockey team winning a Stanley Cup in your lifetime. (That one must be nice. I accepted on May 13, 2013 that this will never happen to me.)
And, for me, there’s the day in the early 2000s when I realized I was still watching The Simpsons, a show that more or less defined my twenties and which I still cromulently reference to this day, even though I’d stopped enjoying it around the turn of the millennium. (Behind The Laughter is arguably the last truly great episode.) So I just stopped watching it, and it was cancelled shortly thereafter instead of becoming a zombie series coasting on its past glories.1
Fast forward to 2023, and what once seemed impossible has finally happened: people have gotten thoroughly burned out on Marvel comic-book movies, and Disney is scrambling to right the ship:
This past September, a group of Marvel creatives, including studio chief Kevin Feige, assembled in Palm Springs for the studio’s annual retreat. Most years, the vibe would have been confident — even cocky — given how the premier superhero brand, owned by Disney since 2009, has remade the entertainment business in its image.
But this occasion was angst-ridden — everyone at Marvel was reeling from a series of disappointments on-screen, a legal scandal involving one of its biggest stars and questions about the viability of the studio’s ambitious strategy to extend the brand beyond movies into streaming. The most pressing issue to be discussed at the retreat was what to do about Jonathan Majors, the actor who had been poised to carry the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but instead is headed to a high-profile trial in New York later this month on domestic violence charges. The actor insists he is the victim, but the damage to his reputation and the chance he could lose the case has forced Marvel to reconsider its plans to center the next phase of its interlocking slate of sequels, spinoffs and series around Majors’ villainous character, Kang the Conqueror.
[…]
“Marvel is truly fucked with the whole Kang angle,” says one top dealmaker who has seen the final “Loki” episode. “And they haven’t had an opportunity to rewrite until very recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him.”
Beyond the bad press for Majors, the brain trust at Marvel is also grappling with the November release of “The Marvels,” a sequel to 2019’s blockbuster “Captain Marvel” that has been plagued with lengthy reshoots and now appears likely to underwhelm at the box office.
This is all an unprecedented turn of fortune for a company that has enjoyed a nearly uninterrupted string of hits ever since it started independently producing its movies with 2008’s “Iron Man.” That wildly profitable run culminated in the $2.8 billion success of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” a high-water mark for the studio that has earned nearly $30 billion over 32 films.
Replicating that kind of phenomenon is never easy. However, the source of Marvel’s current troubles can be traced back to 2020. That’s when the COVID pandemic ushered in a mandate to help boost Disney’s stock price with an endless torrent of interconnected Marvel content for the studio’s fledgling streaming platform, Disney+. According to the plan, there would never be a lapse in superhero fare, with either a film in theaters or a new television series streaming at any given moment.
But the ensuing tsunami of spandex proved to be too much of a good thing, and the demands of churning out so much programming taxed the Marvel apparatus. Moreover, the need to tease out an interwoven storyline over so many disparate shows, movies and platforms created a muddled narrative that baffled viewers.
Amazingly, Disney made the exact same mistake with its Star Wars franchise, following up a confused mess of a sequel trilogy with several streaming series of uneven quality. A new Star Wars movie used to come along every three years, and it was an event. Now you read about or see ads for a new project and you just let out an exasperated sigh, because there’s another one you’re expected to watch so you can keep up.
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