Are We Witnessing the End of Disney’s Marvel?

During his first tenure as CEO, Bob Iger went on a bit of a spending spree to make the Walt Disney Company an entertainment juggernaut. He made billion acquisitions of Lucas Films, Pixar, and 20th Century Fox. However, it was the purchase of Marvel in 2009 that proved to be the real moneymaker for Disney Films. Under Disney, Marvel turned into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut, putting out hits like Avengers: Endgame (2019), Black Panther (2018), Captain Marvel (2019), and Captain America: Civil War (2016). 

Related: Iger Has Some Explaining to Do After Disney Drops $1 Billion on Four Flops

But since the pandemic, Disney Studios has found that many of the Marvel films that would have been box office smashes are now falling flat with audiences, but it’s more than that. Marvel faces several external issues threatening the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Disney’s box office dominance.

Variety took a deep dive into the issues that Marvel is currently facing, and it just adds to the list of things that Bob Iger will have to fix at the Walt Disney Company to turn it around before it’s too late.

The Jonathan Majors Problem:

In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), the MCU was introduced to Jonathan Majors’ Kang as the antagonist in the next phase of Marvel films. And then the worst possible thing happened: Majors was arrested in New York on domestic violence charges. Kang was meant to carry the MCU through 2026, and now Disney has a major public relations headache as it tries to figure out what to do next.

To make matters worse, Disney and Marvel could not have large portions of the upcoming Marvel movies rewritten without, you know, writers. The writer’s strike hamstrung the process, and Disney was essentially forced to move forward with movies and shows, like Loki Season 2, as they were initially written.

A “dealmaker” who has seen the final episode of Loki Season 2 told Variety:

Marvel is truly f****d with the whole Kang angle. 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.

But now that the writers are back, the SAG-AFTRA strike has again ruined any possibility of reshoots. For now, Kang will remain. But as Majors’ case continues, this headache isn’t going away for Disney.

Superhero Fatigue:

The original Avengers films were blockbusters for Disney. And like all things that work, Disney tried to capitalize on its success. To help prop up Disney Plus during the Pandemic, Disney started putting out more Marvel content, and audiences bought it at first, but after a while, superhero fatigue started to set in.

Wall Street Analyst Eric Handler said:

The Marvel machine was pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where there was just too much, and they were burning people out on superheroes? It’s possible. The more you do, the tougher it is to maintain quality. They tried experimenting with breaking in some new characters, like Shang-Chi and Eternals, with mixed results. With budgets as big as these, you need home runs.

And as the quality of the content started to wane, audiences stopped paying attention. It isn’t just the Marvel Cinematic Universe that’s facing these issues. The DC Universe is also facing a similar fatigue at the box office, as audiences are looking for something different, like Barbie (2023) and The Super Mario Bros Movie (2023). But based on the success of those two films, audiences should expect sequels of both.

Box Office Flops

The narrative around Marvel films has been they are recently box office losers. And once that narrative takes hold, it’s hard to break it. The last five Marvel releases have all been sequels to previous movies, and all five failed to make as much as their predecessor. The biggest of those flops was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which was a critical and box office failure. Audiences were critical of the storyline and the effects used in the film. Stories revealed that Disney had prioritized Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and left Quantumania for the last minute, overworking their VFX employees.

Joanna Robinson, co-author of the New York Times bestseller “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” who is a writer and podcaster at The Ringer, said:

I’m not prepared to call it a permanent fall. But based on the numbers that go with Marvel podcasts, Marvel-based articles, friends who do Marvel-based video coverage, all of these numbers are significantly down. The quality is suffering. In 2019, at the peak, if you put ‘Marvel Studios’ in front of something, people were like, ‘Oh, that brand means quality.’ That association is no longer the case because there have been so many projects that felt half-baked and undercooked.

Disney hopes that The Marvels (2023) will break that trend, but that doesn’t seem likely. The Marvels is projected to make around $80 million during its opening weekend, about half of what Captain Marvel (2019) created in its opening weekend.

Now What?

Reports have surfaced that Disney is discussing bringing the original Avengers back. They are reportedly in talks with Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johanssen to reprise their roles. One major problem: Iron Man and Black Widow are dead in the MCU (spoiler alert).

The move seems desperate, though. Getting the band back together for one last Marvel movie seems like a cash grab, and the audience will see through that. What a Marvel fan would like is a new idea with a great script and actors.

But that seems even further away than ever, which is why Disney’s Marvel is in trouble now.

We will continue to update this story at Disney Fanatic.