Examining Marvel's Flop Era

[Music] one semi-common type of comment I get is some variation of lol this aged DW for any botched predictions or takes from different eras that seem cringeworthy for whatever reason now and you know fair play to those commenters it's good to call these things out for posterity if nothing else but of all my poorly aged takes I never thought I'd go broke betting on Marvel despite outlining many of the struggles the MC has faced post endgame in my Top Gun video I still qualified everything by saying it was probably overstating things to say Marvel is

in their flop era sure a couple of MCU films had underperformed at the box office but those were pandemic affected releases and even a terrible film like Thor love and thunder which generated some of Marvel's worst reviews still made Bank Marvel may have cooled from their hottest era but surely they were still going strong or you know so I thought of course that was before Ant-Man and the was quantum Mania a film which set the record for steepest box office drop between the first and second weekend for an MCU film and eventually limped out of

theaters amidst lousy reviews and poultry earnings Guardians of the Galaxy 3 brought Marvel back to their old Heights but that Victory turned out to be short-lived quantam Mania may have flopped but the Marvel's was a straightup bomb the first MCU movie to failed to make back its production budget personally I thought the Marvels was at least better than the Dismal Quantum Mania or the deeply annoying Thor 11 Thunder and that is broadly reflected in the critical receptions but you wouldn't necessarily know that from a glance the Marvel's was saddled with carrying the weight of all

the recent Marvel failures and solidified the mcu's downward slope a wave of think pieces and articles emerged reflecting on Marvel's downfall debating superhero f faue and the overabundance of Marvel products on screen with even admissions from Disney that things had gone off the rails in the 2020s the nail in the coffin for me and the impetus behind this video was the onew punch of July 27th first I saw Deadpool and Wolverine that afternoon and watched The Merc with the mouth make joke after joke about how the MCU has been at a low Point since end

game and that Deadpool was Marvel Jesus sent to save the universe that evening ComicCon the Russo Brothers announced the next Adventures movie had changed its title to Doomsday with the aonomus Dr Doom to be played by a returning Robert Downey Jr for these to come together was just such a naked display of insecurity and Desperation Marvel eager to beat their criticism and doubters by admitting them through Deadpool soaked irony and realizing that the next Avengers had no hook so they had to bring back their old star with a new gimmick ironically in a weekend where

Deadpool and Wolverine would open to over 200 million the MCU still look vulnerable and in hindsight that vulnerability isn't surprising the heavy banking on X-Men Nostalgia throughout phases 4 and 5 is itself a sign of weakness throughout the 2010s when the MCU was hot the general vibe in nerd culture was that Fox's handling of the X-Men had been disastrous Marvel Fanboys would conveniently forget the good X-Men movies and focus solely on the bad ones hoping that Marvel would eventually get a chance to fix the X-Men but now that the mutants have actually made their way

to the MCU Marvel has instead pandered to X-Men Nostalgia with tons of returned cameos and bits of the 9s cartoon theme popping up in Multiverse of Madness and Miss Marvel and speaking of Disney Plus shows what Marvel streaming show has generated the most praise and excitement You could argue W division or maybe Loki but I think it's quite clearly X-Men 97 which isn't even part of the MCU Deadpool can crack jokes about it taking 20 years for Wolverine to wear his classic suit from the comics but Marvel isn't fixing X-Men it's clinging to X-Men in

an attempt to fix itself so no it's not overstating things to say Marvel is in their flop era it's frankly undeniable the fans know it the haters know it Marvel knows it they've admitted it so let's talk about [Music] it the shorthand people use to denote the Flop era is post end game though it should be noted that that doesn't really include Spider-Man far from home don't get me wrong there are criticisms to be made of that movie the fact that the marketing made clear Spider-Man was coming back to life before endgame even hit theaters

alludes to the lesson of stakes that would come to plague phases 4 and five and the movie also seems to be the least liked of the MCU Spidey but it was also a towering box office success that fits in with endgame Victory lap the Flop era really begins in 2021 when the break in new MCU forced by the pandemic was broken by an overwhelming Cascade of branded Marvel content five TV shows dropped on streaming throughout the year and four movies were released in theaters just between July and December Marvel had steadily increased production throughout the

2010s but this was a new level of oversaturation to put things in perspective May was the only month in 2021 when there wasn't an active MCU show playing weekly on Disney Plus or a new MCU movie in wide theatrical release Marvel did manage to score a major hit in this wave with Spider-Man no way home personally I don't like like that movie at all but I can acknowledge that I'm in the minority fans and audiences loved it and even critics were generally very enthusiastic the film also grossed nearly $2 billion soundly winning the box office

for 2021 despite opening during a spike in the pandemic I can complain about the cheap van service or the lack of visual imagination in achieving its spectacle or how the emphasis on externals in defining super villainy contradicts The Core Essence of Spider-Man until I am blue in the face by every quantifiable metric no way home was a win and hearkened back to the glory years of the MCU at their Peak but it was also the exception the rest of Marvel's output in 2021 was marked by Modest disappointment with movies underperforming slightly or downright flopping in

the case of eternals that movie made headlines as the first MCU film to receive a negative rating on Rotten Tomatoes but the other releases weren't that much better black Widow landed with a hollow thud and even Shang XI which was mostly liked at the time didn't generate much excitement and hasn't lingered in the public conscious this broad pattern would hold for the next 2 years Marvel would restrain production a bit but was still releasing multiple shows in movies a year a couple of films would emerge as hits but they'd be offset by disappointments and the

disappointments were growing louder and more frequent moreover the hits Marvel have made in their flop era are not not sustainable for my money Marvel has made five unambiguous hits in the last 3 years no way home Multiverse of Madness wakanda forever Guardians of the Galaxy volume 3 and Deadpool and Wolverine three out of five of these were rooted at least in part in plundering Nostalgia for old superhero movies which has mostly worked so far but there are limits to how many times you can draw from that well the MCU has already drained Nostalgia from the

Sony Spider-Man and Fox X-Men movies they've even stooped so far as to Pander to Nostalgia for the 2000's Fantastic 4 and Electra who else is there to bring back Nick Cage's Ghost Rider the80s Howard the Duck Nicholas Hammond Spider-Man from the old CBS show the gimmick is already wearing thin and the quality of callback is diminishing rapidly wakanda forever managed to build its success on expanding the theme and Aesthetics of its predecessor and it did so while honoring the late Chadwick boseman's memory that said the film was ultimately more successful as a tribute to Boseman

than as a story on its own terms burdened by setup for future Marvel projects the film did pass the mantle of black panther onto Leticia writes shuri but it's unclear if she'll be headlining the franchise moving forward that leaves Guardians 3 which was James gun's last film with Marvel before leaving to run DC's film Division and also seem to close the book on the Guardians of the Galaxy as a team the characters could always return and at least Star-Lord probably will but everything about the film's marketing and release suggested an end of an era and

that speaks to one of the prevailing qualities of Marvel's flop era a generation coming to an end without clear successors put it this way who are the current main characters of the MCU or in Deadpool and Wolverine terms who are the anchor beings the universe used to clearly revolve around the Avengers and specifically Iron Man Captain America and Thor now Tony's dead and cap went back in time each having completed an arc in endgame Thor's still around but Hemsworth feels like he has one foot out the door and the character's Arc has basically gone in

circles so who are the new stars Doctor Strange has certainly been important post end game but he isn't really a star and his character also doesn't scream leader Spider-Man is a star but no way home left him very disconnected from the MCU and felt like a reset for the character given Sony's control of the IP it's unclear how big a role Spidey will have in the MCU moving forward Black Widow is functionally a Legacy character now eternals was pretty soundly rejected and it's unclear if any of its Heroes will ever be seen again I actually

like that movie but even I'm not CL stammering to see The Return of uh Cersei or Dane Witman quantam Mania was a conscious effort to elevate Ant-Man from Light Side movies to Epic event film and it failed spectacularly with a lot of critics openly missing the charm of the smaller scale Ant-Man Adventures then of course there's all the characters introduced on streaming shows but the one attempt to transition those characters to the big screen resulted in Marv 's biggest flop with its failure directly linked to audien's being unfamiliar with the shows Deadpool works at the

periphery of the MCU but it's not like you can put him at the Forefront of an Avengers movie at least while maintaining the R rating and fourth wall breaking that defines the character that leaves Shang XI and while his movie was fairly well liked at the time there hasn't been much demand for his character in the absence since 2021 and the sequel still seems up in the air not all of this is Marvel's fault no doubt black panther was intended to be a major player in the mcu's future before the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman

Marvel also could not have known that abuse allegations against Jonathan Majors would derail their plans for Kang as the new overarching villain of the MCU forcing a last minute pivot to Dr Doom but the bottom line is that Marvel's Old Guard has either left or is leaving and the new characters have not got gotten over the lack of universe direction is also evident in the degradation of the mcu's post credit scenes to be clear these teases have always been more Easter eggs and marketing tools than a nuanced storytelling device but they at least used to

point the way forward for Marvel go back to phase one after the credits of Iron Man Tony Stark meets Nick Fury who name drops the Avengers Initiative a month later at the end of The Incredible Hulk Tony Stark shows up looking for Bruce Banner because he's putting together a team Iron Man 2 teases Thor's hammer in the New Mexico desert Thor hits theaters the following year and depicts exactly that Thor's post credit scene shows Loki circling the tesser ACT a weapon he will use as the villain in The Avengers a year later as an overarching

story this is far from perfect it's weird that Tony goes from being recruited to help build the Avengers to reject it from the team outright to being asked to join anyway but the connections are clear and direct anyone paying attention was rewarded with the stories they were promised compare that to the post-credit scenes of The Flop era many of which have gone nowhere and it's unclear when or if they ever will are Harry Styles or Charlie's theon's characters from eternals or Multiverse of Madness going to show up again is Shang xi's sister taking over the

10 Rings going to lead to anything is Hercules going to fight Thor is Monica going to join the X-Men and if any of this does pay off who is going to remember the setup when it's buried in a pile of endless Marvel content it doesn't help that the teases have themselves become totally uninspired what I love about the Iron Man 2 post-credit scene is how simple yet evocative it is even if you don't know Thor as a character in Marvel Comics The Sword in the Stone esque imagery still establishes expectations for a hero's journey shaped

in fantasy and Royal Intrigue the Flop ER teases don't have any cleverness most of them just show a character that you've probably never heard of unless you're a hardcore comic book fan played by a celebrity and like I should be excited to see Charlie there on but there's nothing here to spark interest Beyond her intrinsic stardom the movies themselves have become increasingly ugly to look at this is a multifaceted problem rooted and crunched VFX teams not given the proper amount of time for the work they're expected to produce directors inexperienced in working with heavy VFX

and inadequately steering Productions and a general lack of formal care and these issues largely transcend any one film taoy TT is one of the strongest personalities to helm an MCU film and was at one time praised as one of the most exciting emerging directors in modern Cinema but Thor love and thunder is still thoughtless in its blocking and compositions Multiverse of Madness is one of the most visually creative and expressive films in the entire MCU and is directed by someone with ample experience working on tentpole Blockbusters and it still has a handful of awful effect

shots Shang XI spots some legitimately impressive choreography and a really fun fight scene on a bus but still climaxes with characters fighting in an endless gray void the negative qualities of the MCU flop era are not isolated to individ ual films but endemic to the MCU itself chaotic Universe building ugly visuals a bland house style and an oversaturation of the market that is devaluing the MCU as a brand these are the qualities of Marvel at its worst but is it really that different from Marvel at their best the MCU hit their peak in phase three

this is where Marvel went from making successful movies to crushing the box office financial success was met with critical praise with Marvel scoring some of their best reviews and accolades including black panther becoming the first superhero movie nominated for the best picture Oscar Spider-Man got folded into the MCU Fox was purchased by Disney and the failure of Justice League all coalesced to declare Marvel the kings of the superhero genre and this wild period of unprecedented franchise Victory culminated with infinity war and endgame a two-part Avengers epic that effectively concluded a decades worth of universe building

in a seismic Blockbuster event that satisfied the fans the critics and the general public Marvel was certainly not exempt from criticism in this period but such descent was dwarfed by overwhelming success this was the mcu's Imperial phase where they were basically Untouchable but look a little closer and you'll see a lot of the same shortcomings as Marvel's flop ERA this is where the post-credit scenes started going off the rails with teases which never paid off or did so marginally years later this is where Marvel increased production to a point of oversaturation with the overworking of

VFX teams contributing to the sliding standards of visual effects the MCU has always lacked much in the way of an aoral stamp but it was in their Peak years that they're defining a aesthetic of flat and gray was solidified endgame may be the most spectacular Collision of heroes and villains an expensive effects heavy action but it still climaxes in an indistinct pit the stars were clear and there was no need to Pander to Nostalgia but Peak MCU is not so fundamentally different from flop MCU what Peak Marvel was that flop Marvel isn't was reliable from

2016 to 2019 you could head to a Marvel movie and know you were going to get a pretty entertaining ROM with some funny character interactions and flashy bursts of superpowered action you might even get a little more than that be it the social commentary of black panther or the emotional poignancy of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 but I find it more instructive to look at the worst films from Marvel's Imperial phase rather than the best your doctor Stranges your captain Marvel's your Ant-Man and the wasps and the thing about these films is they weren't

really all that bad either really they were just kind of mid but even they had their highlights be it the world bending visuals in Doctor Strange or the handful of solid action scenes in Ant-Man and Captain Marvel there are valid reasons to dislike these movies along with some not so valid reasons but the general consensus at this time was that even a mid-tier Marvel movie still scratched the itch reasonably well Ant-Man in the wasp and Captain Marvel also benefited from being caught in the sweep of excitement for Infinity war and endgame but simply The Vibes

were good for all the problems the MCU had or criticisms you could make for all the concern Marvel and by extension Disney's utter dominance of multiplexes at the expense of smaller movies generated for the future of Cinema the consistency made it easy to throw up your hands and say whatever they're fun that consistency is long gone in the Flop era Marvel can still make good movies like pretty much everyone I really enjoyed Guardians 3 and I liked Multiverse of Madness even more in fact I'd go as far as to say it's one of the best

films of the entire MCU those glimmers of Sam Ry go a long way God help me I even like eternals but these highs have been counterpointed by many lows lows which rank among the worst films the MCU at the end of phase 3 there was one maybe two MCU films I flat out disliked in the Flop era there's already been six the Flop films aren't simply bad they demonstrate all the overarching flaws of the MCU discussed in this video while bringing little to none of their charm for example the action scenes now with some exceptions

I don't think Marvel has ever been especially good at action their set pieces certainly deliver in effects heavy superpowered fights but they've typically been more a collection of isolated gags rather than a coherent story told through action you compare the cause and effect logic apparent in say a Mad Max chase scene to the series of random bits in endgame when the Avengers are trying to keep the gauntlet away from Thanos and the difference is night and day but the best of these large scale set pieces still manag to find something to interest audiences Beyond The

Superficial spectacle the suspense of the battle against thanos's Army is less about if the heroes will win but if they can stall long enough for the mindstone to be separated from Vision the battle on Titan has some real fun bits with each character's Powers but it's all built around the heroes preventing Thanos from using his Gauntlet it's simple but it gives a narrative to structure the fight and meaning to the gags even when the action was kind of bad the characters could often carry you through it I think the clashing armies at the end of

Black Panther and the ensuing fight is probably the worst part of that movie but I'm invested enough in the ideological conflict between tchala and kilmonger that I'm still engaged what story is there to engage me when Hank Pimp's ant storm Kang in his goons what narrative is unfolding when Thor gives a bunch of little kid superpowers a thing he can do apparently and they fight Gore's monsters is there anything motivating Darin's villainy other than revenge it's just action for Action sake except a lot of the films don't have the isolated gags to justify even that

the frames are so dark and muddy and the gags so stalk and uninspired that the action devolves into complete nonsense in Broad Strokes are the action scenes of The Flop era that different from Peak Marvel not really but enough of their charms have been Stripped Away that only the flaws are apparent and that's really the story of the mcu's Flop era it's not that Marvel has fallen off per se but that the failures of mounting individual films have deemphasized Marvel strengths while accentuating their weaknesses of course there is also a big Martin scorsi shaped elephant

in the room I should probably address the criticism expressed by scorsi and subsequently echoed by ciles summarized in the sentiment that Marvel movies aren't Cinema and maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion maybe s's comments only matter to the defensive super stands and the pretentious ciles fighting online and aren't relevant to the broader flop era but I don't know it seems a little more than coincidence that scorsi said Marvel wasn't Cinema when the MCU was riding high and since has spiraled into desperate insecurity to be clear I don't think Marty caused that spiral but he

certainly got in the fan base's head scorsi made his initial criticisms 5 years ago and still his comments have been litigated in interviews and online since which is crazy when you think about it is it really that surprising that the 80-year-old man did not care for the movie where Thor and a talking raccoon travel back in time to save the world why has the opinion of an aging filmmaker who likely hasn't seen more than three MCU films been so ferociously discussed I get that sesi is widely respected as well he should be but it's not

like the films he makes have a ton of crossover with the Marvel faithful why do the stands care so much and I think it's because soresi touched a nerve a nerve that's only become more sensitive as the Flop era has become undeniable if Marvel was still consistently putting out entertaining movies still maintaining excitement for the MCU then surely it' be easy to shrug off scor's comments as just another old man yelling at Cloud but they're not their movies are getting worse and they're getting worse in ways which validates gr's points it's hard to deny the

theme park ride allegations when recent Cameo fests are structured around carrying an audience through a parade of familiar attractions it's hard to make a case that superhero movies actually do offer risk when Dead characters can be resurrected as an alternate version plucked from the Multiverse it's not impossible to argue Marvel movies are art but it's getting harder and accordingly a lot of the stands don't and instead argue Marvel's critics are just haters who don't know how to have fun but I don't think they're having fun either at least not consistently and not as a collective

Marvel has always had denters always had people who hated the kinds of movies they made and were unlikely to be swayed but in the Flop era it's not just select film critics or snoody ciles or out of touch old people it's the broad audience who are growing disinterested even the core fan base has been thinning and in that flop sweat scor's comments endure along with an intrusive thought that says maybe he's right so where does that leave us well apparently with Robert Downey Jr playing Dr Doom that gimmick might be enough to make for another

hit the movie might even be good what it doesn't do is leave a foundation for sustained success especially given how chaotic the rest of the mcu's active Productions currently are the Flop era will likely continue and I doubt Marvel will ever reclaim their Peak years of 2016 to 2019 and to that I can only say good no doubt that'll be taken as an expression of my Marvel hatred but it isn't I'm generally a fan of the MCU if you don't believe me just check my lad box but the model of one film franchise swallowing multiplexes

and dominating the box office producing billion grocers in less than 18 months is neither healthy nor sustainable a world where Marvel's power recedes is good good for Cinema and frankly it's good for Marvel the MCU didn't start as a Powerhouse it built itself on solid solo movies that generated interest in a greater hole that's what created the foundation of their Imperial phase scaling back is necessary for the future of the MCU Marvel has made some steps in this direction at least pulling back on production 2024 significantly only saw one new Marvel movie rather than the

minimum three that's been standard since 2017 and they've also slowed down with the streaming shows then again there are currently four MCU movies slated for 2025 and we barreling towards another two-part Avengers event beginning in 2026 despite it being very unclear what from the last 3 years is actually important moving forward changing the course of a billion doll franchise on a multiannual release schedule evidently takes time also making less movies for less money for more modest grosses sort of contradicts the whole exponential growth Vibe corporations are into it's possible that the MCU is too unwieldy

too unprecedented too intrinsically bound to a vast corporate hierarchy to actually slow down and scale back at least not before a cataclysmic collapse and given the amount of money allegedly being thrown around on the next several Marvel films that collapse might become coming a lot sooner than anyone expected if you enjoyed this video and would like to hear me talk a bit more about Marvel you can head over to patreon.com cinema where $5 patrons have access to a tier list video of all the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe from Iron Man to Deadpool and

Wolverine if nothing else that video confirms I'm not a total hater even if hater them comes naturally to me I'll also be uploading more tier style ranking videos in the coming months so if that interests you you should come on over just make sure you don't sign up through an apple Service as apple is going to start adding an additional search charge to patreon signups that they pocket save yourself a bit of money sign up on desktop instead thank you for watching oh and uh if Brave New World opens to critical Acclaim and makes like

a billion dollars feel free to comment LOL this didn't age well [Music] [Music]