Is this What the Marvel Decline Looks Like?

Recently, I got onto a little tear, and sailed through She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney+.  She-Hulk is the latest Marvel television series on Disney+ and while I'm not done with all of the series (I also recently caught up on What If, but haven't done Moon Knight or Ms. Marvel yet), it was striking to me for a variety of reasons.  While I saw it several months after it initially aired (more in a second), it was genuinely fun.  Tatiana Maslany was a blast in the lead role, and it leaned into the concept of a television show in a way that most of the MCU series (save WandaVision) have not.  It was funny, not a sitcom but more something in-line with Ally McBeal, but with superpowers.  Unlike most of the series, it wouldn't work as a movie-it only functions within an episodic nature.  The writing was smart & I generally liked the meta angles (the Tucker Carlson-esque figures made total sense in the MCU).  And while the special effects aren't great, the special effects in most Marvel properties in the past few years have not been great-this isn't really something MCU fans can complain about just one property on anymore.

What struck me about it, though, was this was the first Marvel property all year that I genuinely enjoyed, and I suspect I am not alone in terms of being overall disappointed with the MCU this past year.  None of the shows this year (Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel or She-Hulk) captured the cultural zeigeist in the way that WandaVision, Falcon & the Winter Soldier, or Loki did, despite Ms. Marvel in particular being one of the best-reviewed MCU shows in a while.  It's very hard to trust viewership numbers from streamers, but there seems to be consensus that none of these properties approached something like Loki, and save for Moon Knight, they all under-perfomed most of the 2021 shows.

This was true of the movies too, which are easier to track.  Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Thor: Love & Thunder underperformed their previous movies, in Black Panther's case by nearly $500 million.  It's easy to say "Covid movie theaters" but let's not forget that Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water got people into seats this past year, and Spider-Man: No Way Home was the sort of movie you had to see in theaters.  The only film that clearly out-performed its predecessor was Dr. Strange 2, but in that film's case it was A) coasting off of the total high of the ending of Spider-Man and 2) still couldn't get to $1 billion globally.  And while they were all critically-accepted, none of them felt like a critical hosanna like Black Panther's original movie (Angela Bassett might win an Oscar for this film, but that's less to do with the movie and more to do with Bassett).

Part of this feels like the sheen genuinely starting to wear off the seemingly impenetrable Marvel machine.  The series still has acolytes and makes gobs of money (there hasn't been a true "flop" in the franchise in the way that DC experienced with Black Adam this year), but when was the last time that casual fans were genuinely excited about a Marvel property  I had a friend recently refer to it as "on in the background" television, which it kind of is.  It's clear people are opting to watch the movies on Disney+, and while that's not necessarily the worst thing for Disney (which makes a lot from this subscription service), it's nowhere near the kind of bank they used to make when everyone in the world needed to see the latest Avengers movie.  

The sheen is gone, and looking at the year ahead (new heroes, franchises clearly ending, but little indication that we're building toward anything other than more branches of the MCU rather than something big like the Infinity Saga), it's hard to imagine that 2023 will be better for it.  Remember, when WandaVision premiered, it was the equivalent of something like White Lotus or Severance or Mare of Easttown...everyone in the country was tuning in & discussing it on social media.  Star Wars doesn't have this problem-both Obi-Wan and Andor were a big deal with the zeitgeist & social media.  None of the new MCU shows have caught that fire, and the movies look cheaply made and repetitive.  Short of the upcoming actual Avengers movies or finding a way to fold in the X-Men (which they kind of already did with Dr. Strange), it's hard to see how they recapture that fire without genuinely messing with the formulaic approach to the now deeply oversaturated superhero market.