What was the last great year of Marvel dominance at the box office? Avengers: Endgame, the second-biggest-selling movie of all time, instantly springs to mind. Also that same year, both Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: Far From Home made $1.1 billion worldwide. That was 2019. And then came Disney Plus.
Ever since then, things have been going from bad to worse for the superhero behemoth, culminating in a disastrous 2023 that saw the franchise crumble both critically and commercially, and the sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel, The Marvels, grossed a measly $205.6 million to become the MCU’s worst performing movie ever. Four years of Disney Plus and all the MCU has to show for it is its increasing entropy, its decreasing quality control, and dopier and dopier storytelling.
What was Disney Plus thinking?
We can only assume Disney and Marvel thought a franchise that once produced the likes of Endgame and Infinity War could only continue to generate the same numbers. Something that popular should have enough of the type of blindly loyal fans that don’t care much for quality and substance, right? So they started churning out television series for Disney Plus to increase subscriber count and capitalize on the platform’s biggest IP while maintaining the three-movie-a-year theater release schedule.
While WandaVision, the inaugural Disney Plus x Marvel Studios collaboration, was a success thanks to its ingenuity and complete embracing of the television format, for the most part, its successors didn’t enjoy the same reception. There are exceptions like Loki, Hawkeye and Ms. Marvel (to a certain degree), and the two television specials Werewolf by Night and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, where the creative direction, at least from the outside, appears to have been crystal clear and audacious. Everything else, well, was adrift.
What I mean by that is that on all fronts, from form and style to content and story, the remaining Disney Plus shows were a mess. That’s not to say they were all as awful as Secret Invasion, but none had any lasting impact, because they were too busy figuring out whether they wanted to be its own thing or cater to the movies. They managed to be simultaneously inconsequential, like She-Hulk, where nothing really happened the entire time, and way too dependent on exterior knowledge of the MCU of the past and future like The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. This entanglement then unavoidably leaked into the film side of things, as the movies tried to appeal to audiences who did not have the time, dedication, or patience to watch any Disney Plus shows, while still connecting to them enough to justify their existence.
Disney Plus, its saturated content strategy, and disrespect of Marvel audiences by wanting to reap the benefits of a big following without putting in the work that attracted those kinds of numbers in the first place, pushed the MCU into a corner. It sucked the soul out of a franchise that was initially filled with good intentions. What’s more frustrating is that Marvel always had its own missteps, like most Thor movies, but the web of — excuse my crassness — crap movies, and shows are now caught up in is a lot harder to MacGyver your way out of.
The multiverse dream accidentally killed variety
Additionally, before Disney Plus, there was a lot more diversity available for Marvel fans of all kinds. But when the platform was created, Hulu, ABC, and Netflix had to give up the rights to their little nook of Marvel TV that was producing personality-filled projects for years. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., easily one of Marvel’s best and most disrespected shows, was killed. So was the critically acclaimed and groundbreaking Netflix The Defenders universe. Other more understated and low-scale series like Runaways and Cloak and Dagger were experimenting with surprising new concepts and tones which, albeit not always highbrow, at least felt different.
Now everything looks and sounds the same. Even the characters borrowed from exquisite properties like Netflix’s Daredevil have been flattened to fit the Disney family-friendly clean-cut mold. It’s hard to feel optimistic for the future of the MCU now that they’ve all been brought into the Disney fold. It’s just not realistic to combine titles that are as different in tone as Deadpool and The Punisher and still maintain their individuality. Something will has to give to find a meeting point.
The multiverse was exciting in theory. We all wanted to see our favorite characters and arcs cross over, and we trusted Marvel, the only company to successfully bring a major inter-connected cinematic universe to life in the history of film, to be able to get the job done. But when Disney Plus entered the conversation, they started to bite off more than they could chew. With so many shows and movies lined up that we can’t even keep count anymore and it’s hard to see a future where the current scenario changes in any significant way. Listen, we usually like to be right when we speculate and predict, but this time we sincerely hope we are way off.
