ScreenCrush: The Podcast! - Does LOKI Mean Marvel is Doomed to Fan Fatigue? - MCU Experts Explain!

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

ScreenCrush Rewind tackles all the movie and TV hot topics, offering reviews and analysis of Marvel, Star Wars, and everything you care about right now. Hosted by Ryan Arey, and featuring a panel of industry professionals. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, welcome back Screen Crush. I'm Ryan Erie and the MCU is in really big trouble. This is not like a chicken little, oh my god, the sky is falling where I'm like being a sensationalist YouTuber trying to get clicks. The MCU is in serious trouble and it has a lot of YouTubers like me scared. I'm worried that if Marvel isn't careful, the MCU could go the way of the Walking Dead. Oh no, no! Another massive franchise that basically wore fans down until most of them became apathetic. So a little later, I'm going to be joined by two behind-the-scenes experts of the MCU and co-authors of the new book, The Rain of Marvel Studios, which is out now.

We're going to hear from Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez, but first, let me talk to you and explain exactly what's happening here. We all know the MCU has had a rough year, pal, they've kind of had a rough decade at this point. A lot has happened. Several Disney Plus shows like Moon Night, Shehawk, and Miss Marvel has had, let's say, mixed reception. The Eternal's got a rotten score. quantum mania not only got a rotten score, but a lot of fans think it wasted the new big bad kank by having him get defeated by ants. And overall, the quality of the CGI is slipping and Secret Invasion was the first Marvel project that I consider to be downright awful.

But look, we love talking about the MCU on this channel. We love analyzing and theorizing about the MCU. So I figured that when Loki came out, the fans would come home. And the first episode of Loki is good. Like it's a total return to form for Disney Plus. You know that? Yeah. You've seen that. Yeah. So in the old days, a Loki breakdown video would have gotten us anywhere from like half a million to 800,000 views. And a big channel, like New Rockstars or Emergency Awesome, would have easily seen twice that.

And now, a week later, like as of the last time I checked, we had about 300,000, 350. That's nice. New Rockstars only has 800,000. Emergency Awesome has like 200. And like when you look at my other colleagues, like heavy spoilers, everything always, the views are shockingly low. Now, I asked you guys about this on my Twitter, saying I was surprised. the views were low and asking if people didn't watch Loki or if they just don't care about breakdowns. And I had like 700 responses, which was super cool.

I'm very popular. And the consensus was that fans are just burned out by too many mediocre projects. Now, look, I'm not saying this is superhero fatigue. Superheroes have been around for a century. But I think it's definitely Marvel mid-fatigue. I mean, ever since Marvel Studios started making projects for Disney Plus, Kevin Feige has been stretched well past his limits, which I read about in detail in the reign of the MCU books.

So I'm lucky to have two of the co-authors with, me here in a bit. Now I will say though that everybody's views did pick up over the weekend, which means that people wanted to watch the show, they just weren't like super keen to watch it. So that's an indication to me that fan interest in the MCU is still far lower than it was even six months ago. Now I knew that the Marvel brand had been tarnished by middling visual effects and weak shows and Quantummania let some people down and Secret Invasion was a disaster, but guys this is Loki we're talking about. This is where we live. This is our home. Loki is the show. I love the MCU. I could not wait for this show. And it

it's great. So I was surprised that so many people didn't want to watch Loki like the minute it was released. It used to be that we would pounce on any new MCU project. I mean, we're enthusiastic about the show. We had a lot of fun designing our Loki-inspired merch at our merch store, like this usual variant shirt, Doug is Loki, Miss Minutes Dolly Clock, and the variant hoodie. And by the way, guys, thank you very much for watching, subbing, supporting us, and checking out our store. It is the best way for you to directly support our channel. The link is below. I love you guys. Now, a lot of our fans in my Twitter thread also responded that they did not know the show was coming out so soon, which is fair. Because of the strikes, there was far less promotion. But let's face it, for MCU fans,

they didn't know it was coming out in part because it feels disposable. Like, if you can't watch Loki now, it's just Marvel and that means you can watch it anytime on Disney Plus. Marvel is losing the fans. Now, we have talked at length here on Screen Crush Rewind about how this happened. It's discussed in this book, for instance, that former Disney CEO Bob Chapic pressured Marvel and Lucasfilm to ramp up production and start shows that were not ready, and the results were cheap TV made by committee. And look, obviously, nothing against the talented writers, actors, directors, and VFX artists that created these shows. They were asked to do the impossible and they are only human. Really tried this time, me I really tried. Marvel over-accelerated, and they over-extended

themselves, and worst of all, they over-extended fans. I was rooting for you, we were all rooting for you. How dare you? So my question, as a fan, and as somebody who is lucky enough to talk about this stuff for a living, is the magic gone? And if so, how do we get it back? Or is this franchise really going to go the way of The Walking Dead? I'm really hoping that my guests have the answers. We have the two co-authors of the book, The Reign of Marvel Studios, Joanna Robinson, and Dave Gonzalez. And I will say that we had to edit their interview for time. But if you like what you hear and you want to hear the full interview, it is up on our Screencrush Rewind podcast, which is linked below and everywhere that you can find a podcast on the internet. But that's just

my thoughts. I don't want to take up any more time, though, because today I have two actual experts. This is a huge get for us. We have two of the co-authors of the reign of Marvel Studios, the upcoming book. We have Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez. This book is fantastic. They're not paying me to say this. I've read it cover to cover. Some sections more than once. It is so well researched, intricate. I highly recommend it if you're a fan of how the sausage gets made in the MCU. So I have to talk to you guys about this. So I was shocked, like I said, with the Loki views. Now, not that every, you know, video we put out is going to have a lot of views, but like Loki and no YouTube channel was getting a lot of traffic on this. And like I said earlier

with my tweet, the general consensus that I got from like people who follow me on Twitter and thank all of you for that, the general consensus was that they're just worn out, that there's MCU fatigue or too many projects that weren't good. You know, we are coming off some like bad rotten tomato scores. So my first question for, for you guys is do you think the magic is gone with the MCU and if so like how does it come back for fans I don't know that I would say gone gone but certainly I think that I mean especially I would you know you you very diplomatically put it on rotten tomato scores I will voice my own our opinion and say I think secret invasion was truly terrible like a really disappointing

sort of miss for the talented cast they had assembled there and a great source material yeah great sources here. Just like squandered a lot of potential in a baffling way. Just like all these decisions I did not understand at all. The Marvel fatigue is something that I've been hearing about a lot. You hear about it more now because there are more Marvel fans that were lured in and sort of like the monoculture casual area of Infinity War and Endgame. And they went back and they did their homework and maybe they enjoy doing that homework or maybe they've been with it since 2008 an Iron Man, and they were ready to see this culmination. Now we're much more in the, like, it feels familiar to me as somebody that used to collect

the comics, where it's like towards the end of the 90s for Marvel Comics, it's like I'm not really interested in any of these storylines. They all involved me having to know, you know, like three decades worth of comic history. How could we refocus that? And I think Marvel Comics did a lot in its ultimate comic series, rebooting at the beginning of the century. That's also around the time that the movies came out. out and presented new versions of Spider-Man and the X-Men that people could, like,

understand. So I think we're having a little bit of Marvel fatigue just because people are feeling like there's a backlog, especially with something like Loki, where that's part of its premise. But no one, people could join something like Doctor Who that is a similar premise to Loki and not necessarily have seen all the Doctor Who's, especially because in a sense that's not possible. So I do think that people are going to come around to Loki as it continues on. It might have just been nestled into a weird starting spot where, like, I don't know if we've all gotten over Asoka yet if we're fans of multiple Disney sub-compos. I got that answer a lot, too. Back to what you're saying about the comics, you know, you're right. Late 90s, Marvel, obviously,

like, over-inflated a lot of their properties. We had the Clone Saga. Joe Kozata came in as editor-in-chief. He started Marvel Knights. They did a lot of, like, soft reboot things with Marvel, in addition to the Ultimates line. And I, you know, regardless of how you think the MCU is going to end after Secret Wars, it does feel like part of this isn't too complicated, but part of it is also with the Clone Saga. I was a comic book reader, voracious comic book reader throughout the 90s, and the Clone Saga is what made me realize, oh, I'm not really reading the Continuated Adventures of Spider-Man. I'm reading something that a company is making. And I wonder how much, like with the MCU, when we make our theory videos, we talk about it as if it's real, because it's fun.

It's very fun to say, oh, Thor had a vision. Thor saw the end of Infinity War in the hot tub in Age of Ultron. And of course, we know intellectually they didn't plan everything out straight from the start, but the writers build on each other in really fun ways like you guys talk about in the book. Now I kind of feel like people are more aware, even through osmosis, that the plan keeps changing. I mean, you mentioned several times in the book. You know, you kind of, like I said, this is how the sausage gets made. You talked about how Majors was not originally supposed to be the overarching big bad,

but the decision to elevate him to a status-level threat was based on the positive buzz of his performance. There's an interesting distinction being made between the way in which the MCU built and built on itself via different writers previously to how it works now, because the TV section of it is very interesting to me, the Disney Plus section, because I talked to a number of the headwriters on those shows and they all tell me the same story about how much they're kept into the dark, in the dark, about what else is going on at Marvel and how they're given like a little bucket of characters, extra characters that they're allowed to draw from. Like, okay, you can pull in, you know, you can get to Kat Dennings to be in Wanda Vision. She's on the board.

But then that character might disappear because, oops, they're going to use, you know, not in the case of Kat Dennings, but another character, like, oh, you can no longer have that character because we're going to use them somewhere else. We can't tell you where. And so those writers on those TV shows describe themselves as being like a train and a car, and they're allowed to decorate their own train the way that they want to, their own car, the way that they want to, but they don't have a sense of what the longer train looks like. You have producers on all of those shows that know that are part of the Marvel Parliament that report to the top brass. But the creative writers don't know the larger what, you know, where their time thread fits in the larger temporal loom, you know, if you want to use a Loki metaphor. And so that's so tough for me because you get things like they've always handed off characters between writers. But when you get the handoff from something like Wanda vision to something like Dr. Strange in the multiverse of madness and you see what Wanda goes through in Wanda vision, then you see what Wanda goes through multiverse of.

madness. And even though Michael Waldron, who I really respect and admire, talked to Jack Schaefer, who was the head writer on Wanda Vision, and they were pals and they talked about Wanda, I feel like there's a huge gap between that Wanda that I understood in that show and the Wanda that I then saw then saw in that film. And so then I just- And Elizabeth Olson agrees with you. Exactly. And so then I just don't feel like, I don't feel like I am watching the same story, the way that we used to in the past when these building blocks were stacked upon each other in a slower, more methodical fashion. Now the train is just going so quickly.

And there's so much handing off going on without a sense of the full picture. I don't know how you create in an environment like that. All throughout the book, you talk a lot. And again, I just want to, especially the latter part of like this section of this book, when you guys talk about COVID-19 and beyond was like jaw-dropping. Because everything else in here, I kind of knew a lot of it. but like that stuff, never read it before. You get into a lot about the pressure that Marvel has been under,

Kevin Feigy especially. There's one excerpt here I liked where you say, Feige now had creative control, but not necessarily quality control. And there's a lot of, I think I can use the term finger pointing at Bob Chapik, who was put in a really difficult position inherited the company like the CEO job right when the pandemic hit. But there seemed to be a lot more external pressure on Marvel. to ramp up. How much of a detriment do you think that's been with what's happened creatively and then with fans? There's so there's so many factors, as you mentioned in that sort of like back

little chunk there that we enumerate. There's COVID. There's, you know, the tragic passing of Chadwick Bozeman who was meant to be sort of an anchor for the future of the MCU. There's all these things they could not have possibly anticipated. James Gunn, leaving for DC, all this sort of stuff. but I think that that ramping up of content as you know as Dave and I have been talking about the book more and more

I just can't help but think that that is the biggest sin of this era of Marvel and Chapick does get a lot of the blame I we should be really clear Bob Iger before he left

Disney Plus as an initiative the ramping up of content that was Bob Iger's idea yes he leaves this project to Bob Chapik we'll talk I'll circle back to that in a hot second. But then Cheapick gets booted out because no one's happy with what's going on with these various, very valuable IP brands over Disney, among other things.

And Iger comes back in and he's like, who turned on all these taps? Who did this when like he's the one who did it, right? And he's like, let's turn off some of these tests. We're all trying to find the guy. Who crashed this Swedener Mobile? Yeah. So it's like, so I think that, you know, I want to make sure that Iger has his place and all of this, but to circle back to Chepec.

Chepec, um, very crucially was a money guy and not a relationship guy. Iger's a relationship guy. The, the event that I think about all the time is the, it was like Bob Sheapek's coming out. Presentation where Feige and Kathleen Kennedy, it was this weird COVID hybrid. It wasn't Comic-Con. It was for the investors and quote unquote for the fans. And they came out and they announced a bunch of upcoming projects, many of which have been canceled or, you know, postponed indefinitely, et cetera, since because they were not ready to announce those projects, but were pushed to do so because Chepec and Larger Disney was concerned about their shareholders. And so they wanted to pump up the brand.

But then Feigey is forced to do this thing that he never wanted to do, which is promised projects that he wasn't sure he was going to deliver. on yet. He's always been so careful about we don't say we're doing this with the X-Men or this with the Fantastic Four until we have something we want to announce. Like that's, that's his, that's his approach. So I was thinking about that when I think about Cheapix role in sort of the content glut as a symptom of a larger problem of like, go, go, go, I don't care if you're not ready, go. We got to go. And that, you know, the theaters are closed, the parks are closed. Streaming seems like this gold rush. Warner Brothers is putting things out in the same day. Give it context.

Yes, of course, of course. Dave, I think I'd just talk too much. Oh, no, no. What Ryan said was actually what I was going to bring up, which is that, like, the race to win the streaming wars has affected everything. Just how we digest storytelling. There's, you know, 600 scripted shows that you could find somewhere. Like, I think a lot of stuff that we saw come about from Marvel in this time period,

especially like Secret Invasion and maybe Falcon and the Winter Soldier to a certain extent like for all we know if they were at Warner Brothers they would have been Batgirls and they were just like you know what this isn't working

but that's not Marvel strategy that's not Disney strategy that certainly wasn't the Chepex strategy he's like why would I not have content when the option is to have content because it was a subscriber game at that point and then now as they've

reduced the number because of things out of their control like strikes and box office receipts were back into like we got three marvel movies this year and i'd really like two streaming series so down down from what was supposed to be if you go back to july 2022 this year was supposed to be five series yeah counting what if agatha which for some reason was green little and asked about that in a second iron heart and i think x-men 97 was supposed to be in there too yeah so all those things are supposed to i think we're supposed to get what if season two also this year but i think that's also been pushed next year so that they've already started we're all waiting to hear yeah they've all started putting the brakes on it

and i'll be interested to see when marvel rebounds which for me is a when and not a if because like i even the most marvel fatigued person is going to buy tickets for the next avengers movie uh so we're really just sort of like keeping the balloon up in the air but imagine if we had gone through the same amount of Disney Plus series and phase four with a three movies a year release schedule. Like we'd be coming up on Wakanda forever now-ish. So I think we did sort of like Band-Aid right off with a lot of experimental ideas, with a lot of patching over what they thought the plan was going to be. And so what we've seen up until now has been Marvel problem-solving as they go,

which I guess to a certain extent they always do. But over the first three phases, there were much clearer goalposts. The fact that we got to Ant Man and the Was Quantum Mania and sort of booted King into the big bad thing after his performance in Loki is a good example where they did something similar where Joss Whedon's like, why don't we have Thanos at the end of this Avengers movie? And then Thanos became the thing. So I believe it's something that's like narratively fixable. It's just messier than what we've come to expect from this studio. You said that you didn't think Marvel Fatigue was going to last, that it was a. question of when and if not if.

I am now switching to the slow reception of Loki has made me so cynical with this because there was another massive franchise called the Walking Dead that was unstoppable and now can't even get a million

viewers on its new spinoff shows which feature these really popular characters. I, you know, Deadpool's going to do great. What else? Maybe Captain America will do great. Maybe Thunderbolts. But, like, Deadpool's, like, the only certified hit next year, and it's an existing character.

It's taken in the X-Men in this other universe. So there's things in there to be excited about. But I don't... I mean, Joanna, I want to hear what you have to say here. I don't think they'll ever be able to get fans excited about... Who do I want to... About the Agatha show in the same way that they were curious about She-Hawk. What do you think?

Like, are we basically entering into a, like, a hard reboot on fans' expectations where they have to earn trust back? I mean, they definitely do have to earn trust back. after a number of missteps. I think that's true. How does that happen then? Well, I think in general, I will just say, and what I love about the way that we wrote this book is that we don't come at it from identical perspectives.

And so Dave is always going to be a little bit higher on this idea of like superhero fatigue is fake news, et cetera, than I am because, you know, he points out that we heard this after Ultron, which is true. I just think it's slightly, it's different than it was after Ultron. Um, but you know, Dave and I can duke that out in various, uh, interviews over the next couple weeks, but, but I think that it's not that there's no way back. I just, I don't think we're ever getting back to end game, but it's the same way. I don't think House of the Dragon is ever getting back to the end of Game of Thrones.

You know what I mean? It's just like we're in a different phase of the monoculture. We're in a different phase of the way in which we watch stories or talk about stories. A way to rejuvenate people's investment in the MCU is the soft reboot possibility that Secret Wars presents in terms of resetting timelines, continuities, pruning down characters. The excitement of Fantastic Four and X-Men, which are properties like, you mentioned Deadpool, like Deadpool, these are known quantities for people, so they're going to be

curious, who's the new Wolverine, you know, who's, you know, who's Mr. Fantastic, all of that. So I think that they have a lot of power plays in their pocket. they're just going to have to clear out the decks a bit and dial back the ambition or their overconfidence that people would follow them anywhere. They have learned a rude lesson that people will not follow them anywhere, yeah.

And I will say, like, as a comic book fan, I've always seen these characters as representations of the page. So when you talk about a soft reboot, I wouldn't, like, it bothers me I'm never going to get to see Tony Stark and Wolverine. I wouldn't mind a reboot with a different version of Tony Stark. I don't know where fans will be. that point maybe they'll have moved on to to dc movies and maybe superhero fatigue it actually is real you know dave i know you don't agree with that i don't agree with that but i can see the

greater public agreeing absolutely i mean disney plus uh both across lucasville and marvel studios i think has uh the series that have really hit for them uh have been a different type of series than what they would technically make in a movie something that i really liked about the first episode of season two of Loki, is if you just strip all the Marvel out of it, we get a previously on that's like, time doesn't work here, we're outside of time, and then the episode starts and it's like, but we have a ticking clock in this episode, and that just tickles me as somebody who enjoys how episodes of TV and how arcs of TV work, the idea that we don't know who disintegrated Loki at the end of episode one, and like your very accurate theory, I feel

that we're all going to loop back around to this and sort of, you know, how, our own bootstrap paradox, if you will, in season two of Loki, is just smart, like, ways to do television. I think She-Hulk, even though it might have been a little bit of jarring, a little bit jarring, it allowed itself to be that more lighthearted, fourth wall-breaking, you know, we're not going to tell a Sky Portal story like you are used to, like, Hulk stories kind of ending up in. Instead, we're going to tell, like, this smaller story. That, I think, is, if executed correctly, is what's going to save Marvel.

what doesn't work is if you're like secret secret invasion is going to be like our next spy thriller after like the captain america movie we did like a decade back and then completely dropped the ball on just the interior logic of how a television show works within that run because you probably have to reshoot half of it that's not going to help him again for we covered this on our channel before but for reasons that probably largely were beyond their control with the Russian invasion of Ukraine yeah but still like Secret Invasion was maybe the clone saga of the MCU where a lot of people realized, oh, this is not just bad, but it's disorganized and it doesn't feel like I'm getting to watch a universe far away. Same way Ray Palpatine was with me. It was such like a retcon. It pulled me out of the Star Wars universe in a way that I could. It's like seeing the guy where it's like, if you ever see a picture of Jim Henson working Kermit and you're like, oh my God, what? It's like that, you know, it's like it totally breaks down your... How dare you?

invoke Ray Palpatine on this very, very lighthearted, gentle conversation about the MC, and now we're traumatized. We're still talking about it. I will talk about it until my JJ Abrams puppet is right down there, maybe you have another argument with me. Dave, you mentioned execution. And I think that's really the problem, because we're not comic book artists and writers putting these stories out.

It's thousands of hours of creative input that, you know, Joanna, you talked about that people have to like collaborate across different projects and genres. And in the book, you go into great detail about, you know, Marvel Department of Yes and Victoria Alonso and how the VFX workers were overworked. And then the effect that had on the writers and how the writers were siloed on different TV projects. Like I, it definitely in the book, you're like, this got to a point where it was just totally unwieldy. Do you think there's a future for streaming shows to be part of Marvel or does it just contribute to this ideal? Oh, God, it's a mess. There's too much. Well, I think I have so much respect for the people at Marvel. And I do not blame them for

their assumption that they could figure anything out after they did what they did with, you know, the Avengers saga and leading up to Infinity War and Endgame. They're like, we crack. We figured out how to make movies and we hadn't made those before. And we figured out how to make the biggest franchise in the world. We hadn't done that before. we can do TV and then they just tried to work their TV shows the way that they work their films to a certain degree they didn't have showrunners you know they were like we're going to we're going to innovate this or disrupt this the same way we disrupted filmmaking or whatever and it's just like I don't I don't mean to sound stodgy in old fashion but it's felt

it smacked like ever so slightly of disrespect for the medium of television and the way in which that storytelling is different from the way you you tell you make movies and so you know we heard from brilliant people like Nate Moore who I really respect but he's just sort of like oh yeah we were yeah we didn't know anything about making television so we just sort of like figured it out as we went and we hired some you know and I was just sort of like well I mean there's a reason TV has existed the way it has for so long there's a reason that certain people get a little frosty when you call a TV show an eight hour movie because they're like TV storytelling is different from

film storytelling and especially that Marvel model that we had a really fun time trying to break down and figure out in the book of like how does a Marvel movie get made at at the height of its power at the when all of the gears were well oiled in the Marvel machine how did a Marvel movie get made and one part of it that we loved learning about it was this idea that you go out you make your movie you bring back the pieces and then Kevin Feigy like makes your movie into a movie you know And there's just this, like, idea of Kevin Feige as this sort of, like, producer director on a lot of these films, you know, to the consternation of certain people who have worked from Marvel, Alan Taylor, will say very negative things about that experience and Thor of the Dark

world. But, like, that was the idea is that, like, you make the movie, Feigey sees what you've made. He says, okay, here's the actual movie. And then they have a whole set of reshoots built into their production schedule. then they sort of kind of remake the movie into the final project that we know and love. You cannot do that on a TV schedule. You just certainly, you just simply cannot. And so, and especially with the figy who stretched thin, especially with the

figy who has, because he had to, delegated a lot of responsibility to the Marvel Parliament, which again is made up of a bunch of brilliant producers who've worked at Marvel for a long time. But like, you know, what you find out when you try to dilute the Feige impact across all these different projects is like, he really is the secret sauce to a lot of why this worked in the first place. And his concentration on a project is key to its success in Marvel. And so when you have so many projects that make it impossible for that I'll, I'll, like, fix it in posts sort of thing, fix it in reshoots, then you get stuff like when you look at those TV shows,

like Miss Marvel and She-Hulk are two shows that I have. There are episodes of those two shows that I love and would stack up against anything else. And then there are shows, there are episodes that I cannot deny our absolute messes because something just like the wheels came off to a certain degree. And so I don't think the problem is the characters. I don't think the problem is the writers. I don't think the problem is the concept. I think the problem is just the smooth execution and and just sort of everything

falling apart in the end because making a TV show is a different endeavor than making a film. And I think the reason secret invasion spooked me so much is because I think a lot of people could say, oh, well, Shee Hulk and Miss Marvel, those are new characters, people didn't really get invested or whatever. But, you know, Nick Fury. We've been waiting for the Nick Fury solo project for a long time. And here he is. Yeah, exactly. And you cast it perfectly. and you come up with a premise that really seems, you know, engages with the comic book storyline, but does the Marvel thing where it sort of adapts it slightly for, it, you know, puts its own

MCU flavor on it. And then it just completely flops. And that feels like danger, you know? There's a definite human quality to this, where in the book you talk about, I forget what project they were working on, but Fagie was staying in hotel rooms, watching old sitcom. in the mornings before he had to go into work and he just drew a lot of comfort from that and that's what gave him the idea for Wanda Vision.

Similar things to that, you know, with Hydra being part of Shield, it was in the comics, but Fagi was like, no, let's blow this up. Like, you need that time to relax so your brain can be free to think of things. And the same goes for all the other creative people, you know, coming down from Figegey.

So Dave, going back to you, when we talk about Loki, right? You said you really dug the first episode. Do you see in Loki like a way back, Is this show going to get trust back? And is this how they build it? Like, if you're in the back seat, you're watching this happen, what do you think? Yeah, I definitely think so. It needs to prioritize, and it seems to be based on this first episode, and we haven't gotten

to any actual Kang variant, so this might change. But it needs to prioritize being a fun show first. It has the characters that I like to see interact and talk about gobbledygook, and that's such a huge power for a television show that you could have, you know, elevator, Mobius, Loki scenes that I'm like, you know, more of that. You could have, you know, time conversations that take place in two time periods. And I'm like, you know what? More of that. Why not? The fact that that's such a television-based thing, some amazing visual effects, some great action considering what actually happens. But it's not what we all assumed a superhero TV show would be and what ultimately

Secret Invasion became disappointingly, which is two people wailing on each other in the volume with a whole bunch of CGI augmentation. They have characters. They have an interesting, you know, premise that involves, you know, like timey-wimmy stuff. They have the capability of creating character surprises instead of just building to a big fight, which ultimately some of these shows feel like they are. And I don't think that serves the television model. But something great about the television model, and the reason I agree with you is, this is going to make me feel old. We used to have like 22 episodes seasons, and when you did, there were times where you knew

there were going to be the good episodes, and there were times you just tuned in to see what was up. And if you didn't like it, you only had to wait a week before something else came out. I think if they're going to be spending, you know, like $200 million on a show, I would like to see them last more towards the 10 or 12 episode mark. that I would to like the six episode mark. I think if you're spending that much on six episodes, something's wrong just from the production angle.

Because the thing on top of all this and the reason why we elevate Kevin Feigey as sort of a producer genius is this is all about the balancing of telling creatively fulfilling stories against some of the biggest business backdrops in the entire world. So Kevin Feigey's managed to stay in his place because he does really good at that. Feiger was such a popular CEO because he was able to just acquire and acquire and acquire and let some smart people make good stuff after that. Now he's a little bit less well-received because he has to come in, fire a whole bunch of creative people and basically make the balance sheet add up and make fulfilling stories.

He didn't do himself any favors at the start of the strikes either. No, no. I would. Also, he's trying to pick his next successor, which I understand, but there aren't story people that I understand in high up Disney, that understand it like Bob Iger. And so right now we're sort of seeing a conflict where it's like we're looking for somebody that could understand the importance of good storytelling, but can also pay off for our shareholders.

And you could get an Iger or you could get a Zazlov. And I think they are dealing with the same problems, but just how much they could forward the telling of good stories is how much I extend trust to that. I don't see why they're having such a hard time. I go on YouTube every day, and I see tons of people who clearly know more than Bob Eiger based on the way everybody carmcare quarterbacks the MCU. Like, if they would just listen to me more often, I think that everything would be a lot of there. They should call you, Ryan. I really do think they should.

I could talk to both of you about this for hours. Unfortunately, if I do that, then people won't click on the video when they see a six-hour time code. Dave Gonzalez, Shoehaeda Robinson. Thanks so much for joining me. Their socials are below. So the book is out now, and you absolutely, it is a must read for MCU fans. I'm going to buy it just to have a hard copy, just to keep on my shelf. Thank you both very much for joining me.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.