Front Burner - Is Marvel’s reign coming to an end?

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

After years of superhero films dominating the box office, The Marvels just had the worst opening weekend the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever seen. Sam Adams, culture writer and senior editor at Slate, joins us to talk about why audiences might finally be sick of superhero movies and what that could mean for the film industry as a whole.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcriptsTranscripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi. I'm Damon Fairless. What is happening to me? You are not the only thing standing between this and the universe.

In case you missed it, the latest movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MCU, came out this weekend. The Marvels. It stars not one, but three heroes. Heroines, technically. And it has all the ingredients you've come to expect from these movies. Big flashy action sequences, storylines spanning galaxies, multiverses, seasoned liberally with lycra and comic relief.

Oh my god, we're a team! Except you may have actually missed it entirely, because it was the worst opening weekend for any MCU movie. Ever. Yeah, worse even than the 2008 Incredible Hulk. For the last 15 years, Marvel has put out hit after hit after hit, 32 of them in a row, bringing in around $30 billion collectively. And along the way, it's totally redefined the film biz.

So what happened? Is this a sign that Marvel's domination of the industry might be coming to an end? And what could that mean for the movie industry more widely? I'm joined by Sam Adams. He's a culture writer and a senior editor at Sleet. Hey, Sam, thanks so much for coming on. Oh, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Okay. So Sam, the Marvels for coming on. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Okay, so, Sam, the Marvels may have had the lowest grossing opening for any movie to come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the MCU.

But it was also released after a month-long SAG-ACRA protest, right? So, promotion of any kind was totally forbidden. So, what's the chatter in the lead up to this movie been like? Well, I mean, there have been signs that there are problems with the Marvels for a long time. Certainly the strike is one of them. The fact that you have, you know, an incredibly charismatic cast, but two of the main members of whom have not sort of been in Marvel movies before. Brie Larson, of course, is returning from the first Captain Marvel movie, which made over a billion dollars at the box office worldwide.

So you're not from around here. It's hard to explain. But Tatiana Paris and Iman Valani are actors who will be mostly familiar to people from the Marvel TV shows, WandaVision and Ms. Marvel. And not everyone has seen those. They're incredibly charismatic. And I think if they'd been out there on the road for the last few months, hyping up this movie, that probably would have helped.

But there have been signs that blood was in the water for quite a long time. Among other things, this movie was originally scheduled to open in June, the weekend after the now sort of famous Barbenheimer confluence. Do you guys ever think about dying? And now I have become death. Destroyer of worlds. And Marvel uncharacteristically blinked. They are usually other people move their movies to get out of the way of Marvel.

Marvel, in this case, moved the movie several months later amid reports that they were kind of reshooting it and recutting it, trying to fix it in post. Director Nia DaCosta was saying at one point, you know, look, this isn't really my movie. This is Marvel's movie. It's Kevin Feige's movie, which is true of all of them and everyone knows, but the directors usually don't say. Then Marvel, it seemed like, was trying to throw DaCosta under the bus in the last couple of weeks, sort of putting out these anonymously sourced reports about how she had started making another movie while she was in post-production on this one, which again is very usual and happens all the time. But it just seemed like there were a lot of people were putting things out to prepare for this to be a huge failure. And as you said, it really ended up being that.

Even a month ago, the movie was tracking the predictions where it would open to around 70 to 80 million in the US, which is pretty bad for Marvel, but not terrible. It ended up with a little over 45 million, which is worse than... You have to go back to 2008, the Incredible Hulk movie that was so bad, it almost killed the MCU at birth, to get something that's even close to this. So it's really a staggering drop off for what is, I think, by any measure, the biggest and most dominant franchise in the entire history of movies. Let's go back to Nia DaCosta for a minute, the director. So she's the first Black woman to direct one of these Marvel movies.

And then, you know, we've got three female superheroes. Two of them are women of color. And we've seen that before in other movies. Like, I'm thinking of Ghostbusters here, for instance, where we'll see a movie come out with, say, strong female leads or a diverse cast, and then they'll get review bombed even before a lot of people have watched it. Has that been a factor here? I think the review bombing has certainly been happening in people who don't like that movies that Marvel and Disney have gone sort of quote unquote woke. I do think that that in the case of Marvel, at least that faction is much sort of noisier than it is big. I think this is a group of sort of loud mouth malcontents, but I don't know if they actually have a huge effect on this. If you look at the overall history of Marvel, two of the 10 highest grossing Marvel movies of all time are Black Panther and the first

Captain Marvel. So while there are some people who are annoyed at any of these movies, don't focus on a white man or isn't made by a white man, Marvel's audience has historically been willing to go along with that. And a lot of cases even embrace that. I mean, there are a lot of people who think it's great that Marvel is pushing diversity both in front of and behind the camera. So one of the things that does seem to be a bit of a change is that like a few years ago, and one of these things came out, it felt like a big thing, right? Like an event, like you'd have to buy opening weekend tickets. When you went to the theater, there'd be like, I don't know, four or five theaters dominated by that single film. I guess what I'm wondering is,

maybe you can kind of give me a sense at the peak of the MCU, how dominant a presence was Marvel in the film industry and pop culture? Yeah, I think, I mean, there are a million ways to break it down because it's so dominant. Among other things, the total earnings of Marvel movies

over the last 15 years is over $30 billion. I think the second most dominant franchise is Star Wars. The force will be with you, always. And Harry Potter. You're a wizard, Harry. Both are, you know, the sort of 10 range. So it's just crushes everything else. There's nothing in comparison.

If you look at the, you know, worldwide box office top 10, you know, between 2012 and 2021, Marvel had the top movie six out of those 10 years. So there's really never been anything like it. It's, I think, impossible to overstate the influence that it's had on culture and certainly the amount of money it's made. Right. So then, like, along with the Marvels, this isn't the only superhero movie not to do well

this year, though, right? Right. I mean, there have been signs that what people sort of talk about as superhero fatigue are setting in. There have been two other Marvel movies this year, Ant-Man, Quantumania, and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. They did a lot better than the Marvels, but not great by Marvel standards. And DC Comics, which is sort of the other big pillar of the superhero industrial complex.

They had two huge flops this year in the Shazam sequel and in the movie The Flash, which was the latter was just in trouble in so many different ways. All these sort of reshoots, there's legal issues around its star, Ezra Miller. The Flash star was charged with felony burglary. It's just the latest in a string of legal troubles for the 29-year-old actor. Fans were shocked in 2020 when a video surfaced appearing to show Miller choking a woman in an altercation at a bar in Iceland. That does seem to indicate that there is, you know, a certain amount of audience fatigue setting

and that certainly the people are not reflexively going to these movies just because the studios are putting them in theaters. I do think you also have to point out that it's five months ago, Across the Spider-Verse opened, and that movie made over $700 million worldwide. Exactly. So it's not that, and you know, the Robert Pattinson Batman movie was last year, which is a DC movie, but not in the same universe. And that did really well as well. So I don't think you can say that people are simply tired of superhero movies, but I think they are feeling kind of overburdened by these sprawling franchises, which now include all these movies and hours and hours of TV shows and where it does feel like winning inspiration has really started to set in. If it's not just superheroes, then what is it? You mentioned inspiration. Is it something about the MCU scripts or what? Yeah. I mean, I think you could call it more specifically, sorry to say this, sorry to the world's most dominant franchise, but I think it may more specifically be Marvel fatigue.

You've had this feeling all along these years, these 33 movies since 2008, you know, that some of those movies are great. which is where starting with the first Iron Man movie where Samuel Jackson's Nick Fury turns up, you know, halfway through the credits and says, hey, you know, I want you to think about joining this team. And everybody goes, ooh, the Avengers. And so it's always not just about the movie you've seen, but about the movie you're going to see next or the movie that they're promising that they're going to make in a few years. And that has really instilled the idea in the audience that you really have to see everything. You have to see all the movies. You have to watch all the TV shows. If you haven't, you have to get a Disney Plus subscription and catch up on everything.

And I think they've just flooded the zone so much, especially in the TV arena. Marvel has released, I believe it's 69 episodes of television in the last three years. And so that puts people in the position of it's almost impossible to keep up with that. And I feel like once you miss one of these things, the spell is kind of broken because then you miss it and you're like, oh, it's fine that I didn't see Moon Knight or She-Hulk. It actually doesn't make that much of a difference. So some of it is, I think, just waning inspiration. So, you know, some of it is, I think, just waning inspiration. I think Marvel is in sort of phase five now is the sort of internal terminology. I think they have really struggled since Avengers Endgame, which kind of ended the first big cycle. We won, Mr. Stark. We won, Mr. Stark. so you had mentioned the the disney plus series right now i kind of want to touch on that for a

second because it you know this this was part of the strategy to keep the storylines going right and you know continue to build this universe and and it is a lot right like i'm just thinking of what i was watching over the pandemic right so i guess miss marvel was one of them but before that like wandavision loki just just to mention a few, right? And so it's a lot of series, a lot of characters, a lot of plot points in this really complex web, this universe that they've made. So in terms of the rollout strategy for Marvel, for the MCU, do you think that's backfired? I do think it has to a certain extent. Yeah, I mean, I think some of the TV shows have frankly just not been that good.

The promise of the TV series initially was, okay, we're going to spin off these things and everything is going to be its little sort of self-contained universe, not necessarily in terms of story, but they're all going to have their own style. You know, WandaVision started off in really great fashion. It was sort of this, you know, weird takeoff on classic 1950s sitcoms. But that has really not panned out in a lot of these shows. They started to feel pretty samey, pretty half-baked. Marvel sort of famously has this sort of unique system where their TV shows don't have a showrunner in charge. They have a head writer, but everything is sort of run by the

Marvel producers at the head office. And a lot of things are kind of figured out in production or even afterwards, things are re-edited and moved around. And that just leaves a lot of these shows and some of the movies feeling kind of directionless and ad hoc. And I think that really takes away from the sense that you are viewing an essential part of a larger story that you're going to feel lost if you don't keep up with. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing.

In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Okay, so let's talk about some of the stuff that's coming down the pipe because, you know, they've got a lot invested in stuff that's to come, right? So we've got like the reboot of Blade, which is coming up starring Mahershala Ali. That's been rewritten several times. There's a whole controversy surrounding Jonathan Majors, who's playing King the Conqueror, the villain that a lot of the next phase of the Marvel storyline will be built around. The actor was arrested in March for alleged domestic violence against his rumored ex.

The 30-year-old alleged victim, who worked on Ant-Man and the Wasp's Quantumania, claims the actor physically attacked her. So can you maybe help me understand, what do we know about the challenges Marvel Studios is facing, kind of pushing ahead? Well, and you also have to add the combined writers and actor strikes, which effectively shut the industry down for the better part of the year. You know, what's really interesting is two things happened at Marvel last week. One is that as part of a sort of overall, you know, Disney shuffling of release dates, basically they moved everything

except for Deadpool 3 to 2025 and beyond. So effectively the whole series is kind of on pause for a year and a half now. And they need time to regroup and to get things back into production after the strike. But it also feels like they're maybe just giving the audience a little time to breathe and maybe feel what it's like to actually miss seeing a new Marvel movie for a while rather than feeling they come down faster than you can get them. that you can get him. And the other thing they did is they announced that they're using the January release of the Disney Plus series Echo, which is technically a spinoff of the series Hawkeye. They're using that to debut a new label that they're calling Marvel Spotlight. And specifically what that's supposed to indicate is this is a story that is complete in and of itself. It may have like connections to other things in the universe story that is complete in and of itself. It may have connections to other things in the universe, characters that show up, but you don't need to see everything that

came before it, that came afterwards, and it's not going to be pivotal to what comes afterwards. They're releasing all five episodes at once. So rather than saying, give us 33 movies and 69 episodes of television, they're saying, really, give us a few hours and we'll give you a complete story. Um, that is kind of the complete opposite of what their strategy has been for 15 years, which has really been selling the whole thing as a package. Um, it could mean interesting things for them because so many of, you know, so many great comics are often these little weird standalone stories that don't have anything to do with what came before or after, but it is a really fundamental shift in strategy for them. There's rumors also that they might bring back

the original Avengers, right, as a way to spark interest again? Yeah, I mean, Marvel is so secretive, it's hard to know what to make of that. But yeah, there has been talk that they are going to back up, I don't know, several money trucks, I guess, to get Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans and people sort of back on board. Evans certainly has been very clear that he just was done. All right, so are we going to pick up the

shield again as Captain America? Oh, man, you know, as much as much as I would love to. I mean, that was such a special time. I think Scarlett Johansson essentially said things along the same line. And, you know, Robert Downey Jr. is almost certainly going to get nominated for an Oscar for Oppenheimer this year. It's questionable why he would. I don't know how much how many more hundreds of millions of dollars a person can possibly need. So I don't know if he would want to come back, but it does. You can feel the flop sweat emanating from Marvel headquarters.

They're really desperate to kind of tell people to get back on board. And you can even see that in, they released three different trailers for the Marvels. And then the last one, they use the sort of iconic theme music from the Avengers movies. We destroyed Thanos, but it's not over. My work is inevitable.

There will always be more to finish it. This is just the beginning. Really, really trying to tell people that like, this is like that thing you already like. Just please come back. And it obviously didn't work i'm interested too in the like some of the criticism and the discontent with marvel isn't

just about you know uh the character fatigue or the plot line fatigue. There's also, there's also been a lot of talk about the impact on the film industry, you know, in general. So I'm thinking back to that Martin Scorsese piece where he, he wrote an op-ed in the New York times a few years ago saying that, uh, the MCU movies aren't kind of a quote here, real cinema, that they've kind of made the film landscape fairly homogenous, very recycled. The thing about it is that they seem to be creating, it's another form. It's another form. And their theaters were almost like amusement parks in a sense. So these films now, I think, are more like theme rides in a way. And it's a different experience for an audience. Now, that audience could also appreciate different types of pictures that don't necessarily depend on heavy special effects and

how should I put it, comic book heroes. Do you think there's a sense from filmgoers to fatigue in that sense? I mean, I would like to think so. I think if you look at the cold card numbers, that's probably not at the core of it. I mean, the number one movie of the year is Barbie. And I think the number two movie is Super Mario Brothers. So it's not as if people are rejecting the idea of movies based on toys or pre-established IP or anything like that. It seems to be that this specific IP that they are a little bit weary of at the moment. You know, I do, this is almost useless in the say, but I do in fact agree with Martin Scorsese, one of the smartest and most

venerable people in the film industry. You know, the problem is not that the Marvel movies exist, no matter how many of them, That's great. People like them. Go see them. Have a good time. It is that they are so dominant that they really kind of suck all the air out of the room for everything else. You know, the problem isn't the movies themselves. It's that they determine so much of what else gets made, what gets, you know, theater screens, what gets promotional space, what gets the attention from, you know, journalists and blogs and on the internet and so on and so forth. So there's kind of what the,

what the MCU has done to the, to the broader universe of film, right? Like, like you say, kind of, kind of, uh,

taken up a lot of the, the oxygen where we used to see, you know, those kind of mid budget comedies and rom-coms and dramas that weren't attached to big IP, but, but there's also the career of the actors too, right? So, you know, there were, you know, to, to, to get one of these roles was, you know, pretty much made as an actor. And I'm just thinking about like Simu Liu, who had basically begged, I think on Twitter, basically to be cast as Shang-Chi. But then we're seeing this kind of

more lately that actors like Timothee Chalamet, Jacob Elordi, Jeremy Allen White saying they'd rather stay away from the MCU characters. What do you think is going on there? Yeah, it's fascinating to see people like Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White just in the last week in major magazine profiles, you know, the subject of superhero movies comes up and just be like, no, I don't want to do that. I mean, it is kind of the number one rule of being certainly a young actor in Hollywood that if someone asks you, as they always will, hey, do you want to play Batman someday? Do you want to play Superman? Of course you say yes. You don't turn down your giant payday before it's even been

offered to you. Your agent would murder you for doing that. But these actors are really now saying like, you know what, I'm like not interested in that. And, you know, maybe they're just being kind of individuals or, you know, building their brand in a different direction. But I think they're also looking at what these movies have done for the actors who have taken these roles and what they haven't. I mean, obviously the actors make a lot of money. They get a great deal of provenance. But do they then go on to be able to do a lot of sort of bespoke, heartfelt projects that are driven by their familiarity with the audience? It doesn't really seem to be working out that much. You're not seeing, you know, Scarlett Johansson got to turn being Black Widow into making Under the Skin, which is, I think, you know, one of the great movies of the last 10 years. So you live alone?

Yes. You think I'm pretty? I'm a vulture. There are not a lot of examples like that. The franchise is a star when you make these movies. You don't watch Tom Hiddleston as Loki, for example. The audience doesn't come away from that and be like, you know what? I'd really like to check out the arthouse movies that Tom Hiddleston made with Johanna Haug. There isn't a halo effect

around there. I think the actors are really looking at this as good for a certain amount of payday. It gets you established in the industry. It obviously makes you a name. You know, Simulia and Iman Villani have gone from sort of being like, you know, little Canadian stars to huge international stars. But I think actors are smartly and, you know, directors, I think as well, are looking beyond that to saying, you know, the idea, the sort of 80s and earlier idea that you would franchise would make you a star and then you could kind of cash that in and do what you want. The business doesn't really work that way anymore. And I think they are more and more taking that into account. If we see with the next few releases, say into 2025, a continued fatigue, a continued slump with these movies, what do you think that would signal to the studio execs about the kind of projects they invest in?

Do you think this might open the doors to more original storytelling? I would love to think that. I think probably what it means is that they will just invest in different kinds of IP. I think this might sort of certainly take a bite out of the cinematic universe idea, which has been so much of where Hollywood has been for the last 20 years. It does seem like that is what's going on. One of the most interesting for me and worrying for Marvel statistics about the audience for Captain Marvel is I think it's like under 20% of the audience is Gen Z. And that's your core audience. It should be your core audience for a superhero movie. So if

people 25 and under are not showing up for a superhero movie. So if people 25 and under are not showing up for your superhero movie because potentially they just don't want to have to... If they're starting in the last 10 years, that's a lot of... If you've lived through the years since 2008, it's not that hard to be on top of all the Marvel movies. If you're starting in the last five years, that's a pretty big homework assignment. And I think that generations may be just feeling that is that's more than they want to take on. So I think it may cause Hollywood to, you know, rethink or take a step back from the idea that you have to make a huge number of movies that interlock with a certain number of TV shows and other properties, or at least, you know, give people some things outside that. But, you know, I think it probably means we're

going to get, for example, you know, even before Barbie had opened and become this enormous success, Mattel was already print planning, you know, its own sort of IP universe where it's like, we're going to make a Hungry Hungry Hippos movie, and we're going to make an Uno movie, you know, this movie, you know, that movie. And they're not, it's not, they're not going to be tied together plot wise, but they're going to be the product of a similar approach. So I think we may see more things like that where it's, you know, okay, we've done a Super Mario Brothers movie.

What's the next Nintendo movie? We, you know, now they're doing a Legend of Zelda movie. So what's the next Nintendo game we can turn into a, into a movie rather than like, what's the next Super Mario Brothers movie? into a movie rather than like, what's the next super Mario brothers movie. I don't think, I think it will take more than a couple catastrophes,

the size of the Marvels or Hollywood to go back to originals. If that's, if that ever happens, Sam, thanks so much for, for talking about this with us. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Okay. That's it for today. I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurger.

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