Does ‘Quantumania’s box office blowout prove that Marvel is buckling under the weight of its own ambition?

The MCU has only been getting bigger and bigger with each new calendar year, but it’s just possible that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania imploding the way it has demonstrates that Marvel needs to start going back in the opposite direction. The franchise’s entire post-Avengers: Endgame era has been plagued by more tepid reactions than what’s come before, and while it was initially hoped that Phase Five would wipe all that away, Ant-Man 3‘s failure has only compounded Phase Four’s problems.

Marvel fatigue is something that’s been talked about for years, but for the most part, it seemed like mere hot air, given that the studio was regularly earning upwards of $1 billion for every movie it made. However, it looks like that bubble is well and truly bursting at this point, as evidenced by the way Quantumania started out with a strong box office opening, only to fall off a cliff in its second weekend, precipitating comparisons to such infamous non-Marvel Marvel bombs as Morbius and Dark Phoenix.

The studio really needs to ask itself, then, if a major change is needed to save its struggling shared universe. We know that Disney is going ahead and enforcing Marvel to space out its Disney Plus output, but maybe it should be doing the same for its movies, too? Here’s one big idea that might initially seem like a bad call but could actually be a huge win for Marvel in the long term: let’s ditch the three-film-a-year release plan and return to only two per year.

From 2013-2016, Marvel dropped two films per calendar year, before the advent of Phase Three in 2017 bumped up the number to three. For a long time there, that remit seemed like the optimum operating practice, but with Phase Four offering mixed results and Quantumania turning out to be a franchise low, the smart move might be to return to the pre-2017 format once the Multiverse Saga concludes with Avengers: Secret Wars.

By that time, the superhero cinema world will only be even more crowded than it is now, thanks to Sony expanding its roster of Spider-Man spinoffs and, most notably, James Gunn’s shiny, new DCU getting into full swing. Sure, this would be heaven to hardcore comic book lovers and yet it could easily tire out more casual moviegoers. Marvel would be wise to anticipate this ahead of time and adjust their slate accordingly.

It may sound like going back to just two movies a year would be Marvel admitting defeat, but rather it would be the studio learning how to adjust to continue winning the fight. The greatest lesson Ant-Man 3 could give the company is that shrinking down isn’t always a bad thing.