Marvel Studios’ Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year
Dec 14, 2023 18:56:33 GMT 1
Merv likes this
Post by primemcgee on Dec 14, 2023 18:56:33 GMT 1
From onscreen pileups to offscreen scandals — looking back at how the blockbuster company nearly destroyed their MCU cash cow in 2023
December 13, 2023
How Marvel Studios Almost Destroyed Their MCU Cash Cow in 2023.
Oh, how the folks behind Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have fallen.
Going into 2023, Marvel Studios was still busy licking their wounds from the previous year. Recent big-screen entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe had underwhelmed, notably Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder (despite the involvement of genre MVPs like Sam Raimi and Taika Waititi, respectively). The much-anticipated Black Panther sequel paid tribute to its star Chadwick Boseman, yet his absence somehow made the film feel like its was constantly performing triage. Overworked FX houses resulted in less-than-stellar visual effects, which especially hurt CGI-heavy TV shows like She-Hulk. Rumors of in-house fighting and a musical-chairs approach toward production schedules had thrown their usual carefully curated, inter-narratively dependant approach to serial storytelling slightly out of whack. The phrase “superhero fatigue” had entered the lexicon. There was both too much Marvel “product” on the market, thanks to the double-down approach of spitting out MCU movies and TV shows every few months, and somehow not enough that felt vital or unmissable. (No offense, Werewolf by Night.)
Still, there were a lot of reasons to be hopeful as 2023 kicked off. Angela Bassett had just become the first actor to nab an Oscar nomination for starring in an MCU movie. James Gunn was returning to shepherd the Guardians of the Galaxy series gently into the night before taking on the Herculean task of revamping DC’s cine-universe. Bob Iger was once again CEO of Disney. They had a number of high-profile projects on deck, including a three-for-one follow-up to 2019’s popular Captain Marvel movie; the TV-event limited series Secret Invasion; and a second season of Loki. Not to mention that the upcoming Ant-Man movie scheduled for February would kick off the studio’s highly ambitious “Phase Five,” and properly introduce their big post-Thanos villain: Kang the Conqueror, a time-traveling bad guy from the comics who would turn “the Multiverse Saga” into the kind of sprawling, crossover storyline the company had turned into a billions-generating formula.
December 13, 2023
How Marvel Studios Almost Destroyed Their MCU Cash Cow in 2023.
Oh, how the folks behind Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have fallen.
Going into 2023, Marvel Studios was still busy licking their wounds from the previous year. Recent big-screen entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe had underwhelmed, notably Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder (despite the involvement of genre MVPs like Sam Raimi and Taika Waititi, respectively). The much-anticipated Black Panther sequel paid tribute to its star Chadwick Boseman, yet his absence somehow made the film feel like its was constantly performing triage. Overworked FX houses resulted in less-than-stellar visual effects, which especially hurt CGI-heavy TV shows like She-Hulk. Rumors of in-house fighting and a musical-chairs approach toward production schedules had thrown their usual carefully curated, inter-narratively dependant approach to serial storytelling slightly out of whack. The phrase “superhero fatigue” had entered the lexicon. There was both too much Marvel “product” on the market, thanks to the double-down approach of spitting out MCU movies and TV shows every few months, and somehow not enough that felt vital or unmissable. (No offense, Werewolf by Night.)
Still, there were a lot of reasons to be hopeful as 2023 kicked off. Angela Bassett had just become the first actor to nab an Oscar nomination for starring in an MCU movie. James Gunn was returning to shepherd the Guardians of the Galaxy series gently into the night before taking on the Herculean task of revamping DC’s cine-universe. Bob Iger was once again CEO of Disney. They had a number of high-profile projects on deck, including a three-for-one follow-up to 2019’s popular Captain Marvel movie; the TV-event limited series Secret Invasion; and a second season of Loki. Not to mention that the upcoming Ant-Man movie scheduled for February would kick off the studio’s highly ambitious “Phase Five,” and properly introduce their big post-Thanos villain: Kang the Conqueror, a time-traveling bad guy from the comics who would turn “the Multiverse Saga” into the kind of sprawling, crossover storyline the company had turned into a billions-generating formula.
There may be a timeline within one of the many, many multiverses out there in which all of this goes exactly according to plan, each of these films break box office records, the MCU feels as if it’s once again operating full steam ahead creatively and commercially, no offscreen business distracts viewers from what’s happening onscreen, and executives collectively pull muscles from giving each other too many high-fives. Things … did not exactly turn out that way for Marvel these past 12 months, however. And as the studio that terraformed Hollywood moviemaking and I.P. world-building prepares to exit 2023, it finds itself in even worse shape than it did entering it. What happened?
We don’t want to pile on Kevin Feige and Co., given the tsunami of bad press and emergency C-suite conferences that the production company has endured since January. But when you sift through the rubble of Marvel’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, it’s remarkably hard to put a positive spin on things. This was their annus miserabilis, via a series of both internal bad calls and external events that proved no one, not even this blockbuster-making juggernaut with the name recognition and the deep bench, were invulnerable to harm. It may not have been shaken off the top of the heap in terms of industry supremacy. But for the first time since Tony Stark declared himself Iron Man, Marvel Studios suddenly felt as if it was closer to its Big Crunch rather than its Big Bang moment.
Too long to post the rest.