MCU’s Current Crisis Was Explained By Marvel Exec 5 Years Ago

The MCU is currently struggling to find the success it enjoyed in its earlier years, and it appears that the minds behind it have known why for a long time. Back in 2019, the MCU was one of the most beloved movie franchises in the world and was championed for ushering in funny yet heartfelt portrayals of superheroes on screen that previous comic book adaptations simply struggled to do. The enormous success and finality of Avengers: Endgame placed a lot of pressure on Marvel Studios to keep audiences engaged after having already gone on a journey spanning over a decade with a huge ensemble cast of characters.

Marvel felt this pressure acutely, as Disney had been releasing great amounts of mediocre content in the form of remakes, sequels, and spinoffs for years, trying to simultaneously capitalize on nostalgia while also limiting the amount of additional work needed to create original IP. It was only a matter of time before that business model trickled down and affected the MCU, and its current state of affairs proves just how deeply the studio was impacted by the Disney machine. Marvel executive producer Louis D’Esposito spoke about this five years ago, long before the studio was in crisis, speaking to how its limited capacity prevented it from making One-Shots:

“We’re just so busy. Disney wants us to do it, wewant to do it, and I keep telling them, ‘I’ll do it on the next film,’ but I keep breaking my promise.”

In an eye-opening recent report by Variety, it is revealed that the high level of output Disney demanded for its streaming service overloaded Marvel, creating a dramatic drop in the quality of content released. Because people were stuck in their homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney wanted a near-constant flow of content available for audiences to stream so that it could compensate for the huge amounts of revenue it lost when theaters shut down. This caused Marvel Studios to release a massive wave of TV shows and movies all at once, just so there would always be Marvel content to watch.

In 2021 alone, the MCU released five original Disney+ series, each with at least six episodes airing weekly, and four feature films. This massive surge proved detrimental to the Marvel brand. While some releases were well-received, many others were commercial and critical flops, as the MCU was flooded with dozens of new characters, storylines, and multiverse chaos that were confusing and seemed completely unrelated to each other. As Variety states, it was clear that “the demands of churning out so much programming taxed the Marvel apparatus,” and robbed it of its narrative and thematic cohesion, which made the franchise so popular in the first place.

How Marvel Is Fixing The Problem That Led To The MCU’s Crisis

Marvel is slowly but surely trying to piece back together everything the Disney+ surge broke, best emblematized by Loki season 2, which sees Loki trying to save the TVA as errant timelines grow and run rampant. Compared to 2021, 2023’s release schedule has been much more subdued. Only three films are releasing this year, and they’re all sequels to Infinity Saga releases, so they feel like continuations rather than introductions. Two of the three Disney+ originals, Loki and What If…? season 2, are continuations as well, with Secret Invasion being the only new property. The rest of Phase 5 largely consists of the MCU building upon the work it’s already done, which will allow it to consolidate to plentiful storylines and characters.

Beyond that, the next Avengers movie, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty will give Marvel the chance to bring all of its characters across the multiverse into one project and have them fight a common enemy, which it what has largely been missing from the most recent MCU Phases and is part of what made the first three MCU Phases so satisfying. Avengers: Secret Wars may be a soft reboot of the franchise, meaning Marvel can finally purge all of the messy timelines it’s created and return to form.

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