Fans Concerned about the Direction of Marvel Studios

Fans Concerned about the Direction of Marvel Studios

Chances are, you've heard of Marvel movies. Considering that it is the highest grossing franchise ever, making a collective 26.7 billion dollars, you would have to be living under a rock not to. These superhero films have killed it in theaters for years now, pulling in all types of viewers from the casual and occasional moviegoer to the comic book mega nerd. Confidentially, I may be considered one of these nerds. I would never have imagined I would fall in love with a superhero blockbuster franchise, but the more I saw them in theaters, the more in love I became. Now, I am among the many fans of marvel films who eagerly await the next release.  

Marvel can attribute a lot of its success to its amazingly simple value proposition. Marvel makes family friendly films (and recently, TV shows) based on classic comic book characters. Many of these characters are already known and loved by the public. These films also have the luxury of being high budget films in most cases as Marvel Studios is owned and supported by Disney. This allows for innovative special effects, great film writers and directors such as John Favreau, and wonderful actors such as the beloved Robert Downey Jr. Additionally, by now, marvel has had the time to create an utterly massive movie franchise of 29 films! That has given a lot of people a lot of time to get on board with the franchise, especially considering the unique nature of the franchise in which you often do not have to have seen any of the previous movies to understand the one you're watching.  

All these reasons have culminated into massive success for the studio, but a lot of that success seems to be slowing down as of late. Recent film and TV releases have left countless fans feeling questionable at best about the future of the franchise. Many have taken to Instagram to comment on Marvel's promotional posts to communicate concerns. These few below are among the many.  

 These comments mention three different major trends in the flood of negative comments surrounding the studio. In the first comment by @quancel, they speak on the decline in the quality of recent marvel shows, saying they had never had a challenging time finishing one until the release of the most recent two marvel shows, She Hulk: Attorney at Law and Ms. Marvel. They go on to mention that there also hasn't been a movie released by marvel that they have enjoyed since Avengers Endgame which came out in 2019. Both perspectives are popular ones. Regarding the first point, while many of the Marvel TV shows have created controversy among fans, some such as Loki and Wanda Vision were generally loved. Even those shows that remained controversial were never met with the caliber of backlash that Ms. Marvel and especially She Hulk: Attorney at Law have received. She Hulk: Attorney at Law seems to consist of poor writing, horrible CGI, cringe worthy woke moments, and inconsistencies that even the most minor of marvel fans can have trouble with. Quincel's second point is also an important one, that they haven't enjoyed a marvel movie since Avengers Endgame. Aside from Spider Man: No Way Home, recent marvel films have grossed record lows and received some of the worst rotten tomato scores of the entire franchise. Films such as The Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder flopped hard, with Thor: Love and Thunder marking Marvel's lowest rated marvel movie to date. It seems Quincel is not alone.  

The next comment by @markhurtado_film_and_tv mockingly mentions how "woke'ified" Marvel's recent content feels. This particular comment is under an advertisement for She Hulk: Attorney at Law. Throughout the show, characters twerk, and hyper prejudice fuels the premise. She Hulk's experiences with prejudice are what allows her supernatural control over her powers, and if you have seen the original Hulk, you know that Bruce Banner (the Hulk) spends the entirety of those films and well into the Avengers films attempting to control his Hulk transformations but to minimal avail. Whereas in She Hulk, she walks the red carpet as the She Hulk. These woke moments and themes make it difficult to stay engaged with the show without it feeling like an image campaign for Marvel.  

Lastly, @josh00_14 states that if this new film is as bad as Thor: Love and Thunder, they are going to cancel their Disney+ subscription. This comment was placed under an advertisement for the upcoming Wakanda Forever. This poses a slightly different challenge for Marvel. Marvel has been releasing exclusive content on Disney+ nearly since the release of Disney+. One of the major reasons consumers have bought into Disney+ is because of these releases. If Marvel continues to release content that viewers aren't interested in, it's highly likely there will be a major decline in subscriptions to Disney+.  

Marvel uses most of your typical channels of marketing in rather typical ways. They produce commercials that rarely portray anything other than the premise of the movie, and social media posts that either do the same or tease film releases before they're known. Marvel does have the slightly more unique marketing opportunity of advertising via toys and stuffed animals. Marvel's most unique marketing tool, however, is comic con. Comic con is a place where all things comic book convene in one ginormous convention full of games, memorabilia releases and interviews with actors, writers, etc. Marvel has of course often been center stage at comic con, giving them the opportunity to use it as a marketing channel in which they can release the latest information such as new movie releases.  

It is suspected that some of the studio's below-average content may be a result of perhaps their biggest challenge at the moment, pressure from the public. Recently, many cultural phenomena have taken flight such as cancel culture and a "woke" perspective. The "Woke" perspective is characterized by hypersensitivity and a major emphasis on being politically correct. There has been a lot of pressure from the media lately for businesses, especially those involved in entertainment, to support and embody the "woke" perspective out of fear of getting "cancelled" or not being perceived as sympathetic and supportive activists for the various major movements of the today. This has driven a lot of companies to incorporate this culture into their products in ways they otherwise might not have. This includes Marvel who might have felt they needed to alter their films in order not to be perceived as offensive in hopes of avoiding being "cancelled" by the media. They have so far avoided any major scandals, but perhaps at the expense of loyal fans and thousands if not millions of dollars.  

Marvel viewer's very outspoken consensus of the projection of the studio has prevalent for some time now and after doing some digging, I can confidently say that marvel really hasn't done that much out it. They have not cancelled shows or made any official statement to console their fans. One of the only real ways they have responded was through Anthony Russo, one of marvel's directors, who stated in an interview with NBC that, "The entire life of the MCU has seen ups and downs, there’s going to naturally be an ebb and flow to how people are feeling about it based on the latest offering. But I think — look, at the end of the day, they’re still being very ambitious in terms of how they approach the storytelling. They’re being experimental. They’re looking for new forms of expression to keep audiences excited and surprised. It still seems like they have a vital creative code and process that they’re pursuing, so I do believe there’s still a lot of hope for what’s possible in the MCU. We haven’t lost faith in it, that’s for sure." This comment was made in July of 2022, and more concerning content and other bad signs have been revealed since. I don't think this was a very comforting statement to begin with. Considering that it only seems to have gotten worse since this statement, it's safe to say that there are no obvious signs that Marvel's bad streak is ending any time soon.  

If I were the brand manager, I would most definitely have released a public statement via social media by now. In marvel's instance, I would have made the statement first at comic con, so that the most intense fans felt heard and privy to the information. I would also make sure that in that statement, I admitted to some of the recent content not being up to par, instead of pretending not to understand what the fans are trying to communicate. I would then replicate that statement on social media for all to see. What would be most important in this instance, just like any other scandals incident, would be follow up. Fans would need to see a change in the content being released by Marvel after this point.  

In doing the research for this blog, I learned how important a loyal following is. When you realize the true consequences of Marvel losing their fanbase, not just the collapse of the largest franchise ever but perhaps the end of a whole new branch of the Disney company, Disney+, you realize the power of the loyal consumer. These are the people that write the articles that the general public reads to see if they want to see the movie. These are the people that see the movie first and then tell friends how they felt about it. These are the people that see the movie two and three times and bring more people with them each time. Without these eager fans, Marvel may very well have self-sabotaged their way to the end of one of the most significant cinematic events in all movie history.