This is an IGN opinion piece from Alex Zalben, who has been covering movies and TV for years with a focus on Marvel and DC, as well as hosting the regular live show and podcast Comic Book Club. One time he touched the Spider-Man balloon before the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and cried.
This weekend, Spider-Man: Brand New Day swung higher than a spider has ever swung before with a record-breaking box office that didn’t just include the number one opening day of all time, beating Avengers: Endgame, but also toppled Endgame’s weekend record with a stunning $360 million for the biggest US opening of all time (it came in hot at number two of all time internationally, but still, not too shabby). And while that’s a reason for Sony Pictures to celebrate like only a spider can, it clinches a feeling that’s been bubbling for the past few years: The Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it is over.
Pretty toxic take, right? Stop raining on our parade? If you can listen to the reasoning for a moment over the cries of “oh, Marvel is so back,” you can see a pretty clear pattern here, and a clearer path for success for Marvel Studios that will be impossible to ignore. The short version? Going forward, they’ll be making Spider-Man movies, Avengers movies, and that’s pretty much it. Sure there will be outliers, and we’re all excited (or, most of us are) for the MCU’s upcoming X-men reboot. But no Marvel movie or TV property has reached the heights of Spider-Man or Avengers, and in a time when Marvel – and perhaps more importantly, its parent company Disney – is wrestling with how to replicate the monoculture success of its first 10 years, they’re going to slip back into what comfortably works. Thus far that’s been Peter Parker and movies that are labeled Avengers movies, but are basically the modern equivalent of Circus of the Stars (look it up, kids).
How the MCU Got to This Point
While probably too much ink has been spilled over the state of the MCU post-Endgame, it’s undeniable that, whatever you think about the quality of the movies and TV shows being produced by the studio, the actual viewership, be it in movie theaters or on streaming, has dropped over time. Part of that has nothing to do with Marvel and is an indicator of changing habits with moviegoers and streaming viewers, and is something that every studio and production company is wrestling with… And frankly will continue to wrestle with, as “change” has been the operating word of the entertainment industry since a train first came through a tunnel on screen, spooking audience members into thinking it was going to crash right into them.
But when it comes to Marvel specifically in the past five years versus the entire history of film, the box office returns haven’t been returning the same way they did reliably prior to 2019. There have been pops here and there, but if we’re looking at the billion-dollar worldwide benchmark that has become the default success marker in the past decade, only Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine have crossed that point, while the rest of the MCU has barely scratched or passed the $500 million mark. Is that still an insane amount of money? For sure. But we’re talking about what studios look at, which includes what shareholders look at, which is a non-stop, upwardly moving spiral of profit. The Fantastic Four: First Steps capping out at $522 million ain’t gonna cut it, and frankly isn’t that much better than the disastrous worldwide take of The Marvels ($206 million).
On the TV side, we’ve been seeing the same sort of attrition, with viewership sloughing off over time. An important note here for clarification: while box office numbers are widely and regularly reported, streaming numbers are a little trickier. There are plenty of fan rankers and tracking of “social conversation,” but self-reported numbers by streamers often require multiple asterisks of clarification (“the second biggest streaming debut for a character named Loki this month on a Tuesday,” etc., etc.). So it’s helpful to look at outlets like Nielsen, which provide independent reporting of streaming viewership usually on about a month delay. That said, where once Marvel was a regular on Nielsen’s charts, later seasons of TV have barely scratched the Top 10 Streaming Originals chart, with Daredevil: Born Again failing to chart at all, and Wonder Man popping in for its first week then popping out. And not to keep focusing on that billion number, but the billion minutes benchmark that Netflix regularly breaks on Nielsen’s chart has been a faraway dream for Marvel TV’s Disney+ shows for the past few years.
Without getting too in the weeds here, we’ll also clarify that when it comes to streaming, big pops aren’t the only important measure, and the vast library of MCU movies and TV shows on Disney+ is assuredly a subscription draw for the company, as is the repeated binge viewing of MCU sagas leading to big events like Avengers: Doomsday.)
The point here is that the MCU, as it stands, is not working the way it should be, both in movies and on TV. And the cracks are starting to show even in the past week leading up to Spider-Man’s boffo BO (and no, not the kind he gets from jumping around in that costume all day). First, Marvel canceled the already renewed Wonder Man, conveniently after show co-creator Destin Daniel Cretton was done with his press tour and red carpets for Brand New Day, which he directed. As noted above, Wonder Man wasn’t a ratings killer, but it was one of the more universally critically acclaimed series from the MCU in recent history, and even nabbed a surprise Emmy nomination for star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. And a day later, Mahershala Ali stuck a stake in the long in development Blade reboot, essentially saying he’s moving on from the project. (For his part, Marvel boss Kevin Feige earlier called himself a “gigantic loser” for not getting the movie, which was announced in 2019, to work.)
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