All good things come to an end. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s streak of a couple of dozen box office hits has finally had its first certifiable flop: The Marvels. You could have seen this coming a mile away and the SAG-AFTRA strike certainly didn’t help when Bree Larson and the rest of the cast couldn’t promote it.
However, I saw this coming because the last Ant-Man movie didn’t do too well. There is an audience fatigue and it has to do with a glut of content. Three movies and a handful of Disney + with interconnected stories created too much content for an audience that was probably just happy to see 1-2 movies. It’s also clear that too much content puts a strain on Disney’s studio in creating content and stunning visual effects since the VFX has to be doled out to independent contractors. I think Marvel can succeed by going back to basics and perhaps, eliminating the shows and concentrating on the box office of a couple of movies every year. While I understand the need to create content for streaming, I think 18 to 24 episodes a year of shows, is hurting the box office and the future of the films. Solo, the Han Solo prequel crashed and burned, probably because it was 6 months after the release of The Last Jedi. That ended the off-saga movies and we haven’t had a new film since Rise of Skywalker. Star Wars is being helped by the Disney+ shows, but they are going to have to consider cutting back on those if they decide to return Star Wars to the theaters.
The greatest film series with long legs like James Bond, have continued because there isn’t enough new content to create fatigue. Release a Bond movie again every year, like they did in the 1960s, and that would kill that series pretty quickly. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing because an audience can only watch so much.
