By Jack Levy, Staff Writer
Since Disney acquired Marvel in 2009, Marvel movies have dominated the Hollywood superhero genre. Since 2012 when Marvel made “The Avengers”, Marvel has released 25 movies and a number of spinoff TV shows on Disney Plus.
However, series fatigue may be setting in. Marvel’s latest film “Kraven the Hunter” bombed at the box office, bringing in $62 million on a $110 million budget and received a critic score of 35 percent on Metacritic and 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
Marvel’s 2023 film “The Marvels” was another box office bomb and received a critic score of only 62 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
The spinoff series “She Hulk” also received mixed reviews from critics, as well as a 32 percent audience score on rotten tomatoes. Last year, Disney’s CEO Bob Iger pledged to reduce the output of Marvel films to focus on the quality of the product.
Marvel fans on campus shared their thoughts on the apparent decline in quality of the franchise.
“They went quantity over quality,” senior business administration major Dylan Lynagh said. “They even said they were going to slow down with the movies.”
Lynagh discussed the quantity over quality model Disney seems to have been following with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“There’s too much to keep up with,” Lynagh said. “Casual fans don’t want to have to watch five movies and multiple seasons of different shows on disney plus every year to keep up with the franchise. Especially when the movies have been falling off.”
Senior Computer Science major Gus Ciaccio warned that Disney will lead to Marvel’s downfall and compared the company’s handling of the franchise to their handling of Star Wars.
“When Disney first released their Star Wars movies, everyone was excited about them,” Ciaccio said, “but now there’s so much of it that nobody wants to go through the effort of keeping up with it. They don’t actually care about making a good movie or series, they just know they’ll make money because people will always watch Star Wars. They’ve been doing the same thing with Marvel for a while.”
DC comics have always been a competitor to Marvel but recently, they haven’t reached the same heights of success as Marvel. This may be changing as DC has come out with new movies such as “The Joker”, “Shazam”, “The Flash”, “Justice League”, and “Black Adam.” Most notably, DC’s hit series from last year “The Penguin” was nominated for and won a number of awards including a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Limited Series.
Ciaccio believes that competition with DC can drive the quality of Marvel movies back up.
“I think competition is good for any product. DC was pretty much dead when Marvel was on the rise a few years ago and the lack of competition made Disney too comfortable with Marvel. ‘The Penguin’ showed that people are just as interested in the DC universe as they are in the Marvel universe. Now that DC presents an actual threat to Marvel it’s gonna make Disney have to re-evaluate what they’re doing.”
Marvel already has movies slated for as far as 2027, however, the franchise might be on thin ice with its casual fanbase.
As DC increases their level of competition with Marvel, Marvel will have to prove that the franchise can still make hits for its fans.
“Marvel still has the advantage over DC,” Lynagh said. “There have been a few bad ones but fans are still interested in most of the movies. They just have to get back to their roots. We don’t need three or four mediocre movies a year. We’d rather have one or two great ones.”
Marvel has been a staple of Hollywood for years at this point, but if the franchise doesn’t find a way to regain the trust and interest of its fans, the franchise is at risk of falling into obscurity.
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