Is superhero fatigue killing movies? Don’t the terrible numbers of 2023 show that there’s superhero fatigue? And if so, why does it exist? Is it because there’s too much to watch? Because it’s bad? Because it’s too “woke?” (Not even those scare quotes can convey the sarcasm I type that with.) Because Millennials are too old? Because Gen Z won’t go out to the movies? Most importantly, how can we make money again? WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE MONEY?
Everyone from Screen Rant to Forbes talks about this trend as if it’s a given, but no one can seem to agree on what it is and why it’s so pervasive. If you read the industry-focused analyses, the clear indicator is the rapidly declining success of the superhero movie as the box office juggernaut it was throughout the 2010s. If you read the fansite analyses, the clear indicator is the rapidly declining reviews both from critics and audiences (and from non-audience review bombers). But both of these are symptoms with no single clear cause, so anyone can project their own assumptions onto them. And that’s what’s happening, because these analyses are part of the actual real problem. They are themselves a symptom that is indicative of a totally different problem: the addiction to canon.
Addiction to Canon
A better phrase for what I’m about to describe is “addiction to the mastery of canon knowledge,” but I’m shortening it to “addiction to canon” for ease of use. This refers to an audience member’s (and critic’s) satisfied feeling of knowing where a franchise is going both within and beyond a given movie or series based on their awareness of the characters, storylines, and themes of the franchise as a whole. If there is anything that the MCU has brought to the mainstream, it is this. But addiction to canon didn’t begin with the MCU – it has been around for a long time in many different fan spaces. What the MCU did was weaponize it and inflict it on even casual moviegoers. Whereas in the past, franchises built slowly and allowed time for nostalgia to settle in, the MCU’s early innovation was essentially a rapid-cycling nostalgia. The crossovers and interconnected references created nostalgia responses in audiences almost immediately instead of years or even decades later.
The way it manifests itself is in a mix of loyalty and fickleness. Fans feel driven to experience the stories being presented, but they also feel a high degree of entitlement and ownership over those stories. This entitlement is at the core of the problem that leads to what many perceive as “superhero fatigue.” Because as long as the canon stories follow those fans’ expectations, everything’s fine. As soon as there’s any sort of departure or experimentation, however, fan opinion quickly turns negative. This puts franchises in an untenable position: keep feeding expectations through formulaic rehashing of the same old characters, plots, and tropes, or try to do something different and thus basically guarantee fan backlash.
Dying in the Middle
Many franchises over the past few years have tried to find a middle ground that blends these two approaches, and this is the main reason for their frequent failures. The problem is that catering to nostalgia and growing new audiences are fundamentally opposed goals. It is possible for a piece of media to accomplish both, but media that sets out to do both is almost never successful at either.
The MCU spent so long building that rapid nostalgia that moving forward into new stories after Endgame became almost impossible. The aging Millennials could see new stories with new characters coming, and they didn’t like it. They felt alienated, and so they complained. A lot. And because that complaining was pervasively online rather than at fan conventions, the studio saw it and panicked. They tried to do all the different things that people claimed to want: longer movies (Eternals), shorter movies (The Marvels), lots of action (Shang-Chi), lots of character development (Ms. Marvel), big scary villains (Quantumania), small humorous villains (She-Hulk), political thrillers (Falcon and Winter Soldier), weird horror (Multiverse of Madness), and so on. But with every story, the fans complained. Or at least some of them complained very vocally and with a presumed authority that they were speaking for everyone.
And so Marvel began to question itself, to change things mid-production, to add or drop characters or even entire stories out of fear of how they would be received. Bolder ideas were shackled with fearful, reactive pablum. Creative vision – which had never been the primary goal of the MCU anyway – became subsumed even further by the needs of catering to the immediate consumer. The problem, however, was that the stories being presented were at their heart all about moving beyond the initial nostalgia-inducing core of the MCU. Once you start introducing characters like Ms. Marvel, America Chavez, and Hawkeye (Kate Bishop), you’re signaling your intentions to build towards a new generation. This meant that the nostalgia-seekers were never going to be happy with these stories anyway. But because the producers were still trying to reach them as well, they weren’t fully committing to finding those new audiences either.
For example, many reviews of Thor: Love and Thunder talked about how the tone was muddled and unclear on what it was trying to do. I would argue that the actual story of Love and Thunder figured out its tone just fine, and the major problem was the fact that we were force-fed a Guardians of the Galaxy short film at the beginning. That section ramped up the silliness, infantilized the movie’s main character, and took critical time away from the Gorr backstory, and it didn’t give us anything important that we couldn’t have gotten in a different way. A little bit of patience and trust would have let this fanservice show up somewhere else (or gotten rid of it entirely).
Drawing the Wrong Conclusions About Demographics
All of these production and marketing decisions are based on data, of course, but the problem with data is that it can tell multiple stories. It doesn’t always convey root causes. You have to figure those out yourself. But as I’ve mentioned, most analyses stop at symptoms and assume the symptoms themselves are the cause.
For instance, the skew in the Marvel audience has always been towards white males under 25. The same is generally true of DC as well. But the conclusion that studios and fans alike draw from this is that this is the “natural” audience for superhero movies. They point out that even Captain Marvel had a majority-male audience. The only superhero movie to break into majority-female was the first Wonder Woman (though it’s hard to tell about WW 1984 because of its Covid-related streaming release).
The important question is – Why was Captain Marvel‘s audience still mostly male? Well, it was the second of two MCU movies released between Infinity War and Endgame, and the end-credits scene of Infinity War clued in the nostalgia-seekers that Captain Marvel would be “essential viewing.” Wonder Woman did not have those kind of deep ties to its franchise (despite a Gal Gadot appearance in Batman v Superman), and many of its viewers were new to the series. Considering the box office drop from Wonder Woman to Justice League, many of those viewers didn’t stick around, either. Superficial analysis might suggest that the efforts to build a new audience failed, but you don’t get to $824 million without some repeat viewing and/or positive word-of-mouth, and certainly Justice League dipped on one or both of those vectors.
Since Endgame, MCU audiences have been trending gradually downward. The Spider-Man movies did well, but then Sony squandered that with a run of Spider-adjacent movies that have, to put it mildly, not. Even last year’s “bright spot” of Guardians 3 ended lower than the second installment, although not significantly. And some of the arguments about why has centered around films not catering sufficiently to that “natural” audience. But that audience doesn’t exist in the same way it once did. Viewers who were in high school or college when Iron Man came out are in their 30s or even 40s now. The MCU audience has aged to the point where it doesn’t have “superhero fatigue,” it just has fatigue.
So while it’s likely that these fans wouldn’t be coming out as much anyway, and they aren’t watching the same things on streaming that they might have 16 years ago, the most vocal of them claim that the problem is with the shows and movies themselves rather than with their own calcifying tastes. Whereas the young versions of those fans would suffer through a Thor: Dark World or an Iron Man 3 and not claim that the MCU was dying, the aging viewer has a lower tolerance for mediocrity or even for otherwise good stories not directly targeted at them. They’re going to be grumpy almost no matter what, so why cater to them?
To return to the previous point, the demographics are inevitably pulling the nostalgia-seekers away from the MCU. It’s time to focus on finding a new audience.
Dealing With Canon Addiction
Superhero movies are built to be blockbusters. And while it is true that you can have too many tentpoles, there’s still an audience for event movies. In 2023, Mario and Barbie both pulled in the young and diverse audiences that the MCU is struggling to find, whereas the older audience that used to be the core of the MCU was seeing Oppenheimer. But the main difference is the viewer’s sense of expertise. Each of these other movies were accessible to their audiences because more people had the feeling that they “knew enough” to understand them. Quantumania suffered backlash from viewers who just wanted more of the same Ant-Man jokes they already knew. They didn’t want to see a Cassie Lang origin story or an OG Hank & Janet duo story, because they didn’t know as much about those things. But at the same time, younger fans who might have enjoyed a stronger focus on Kathryn Newton’s character were turned off by how much MCU homework they’d have to do to follow this movie.
Could Quantumania have worked as a “Stature/Stinger” origin with just some cameos from the others? At the very least, I think it would have done better at reaching new audiences. And since it failed at both that AND at reaching the nostalgia-seekers, that would have been an improvement. Cut back on the essential background knowledge, tell it more like a standalone story, and go. Ms. Marvel did this, and it pulled in a bunch of people who don’t normally watch Marvel stuff. If the MCU could do that enough times and really commit to it, they could successfully rebuild a new, younger audience.
And the thing is, the Marvel creatives seem to kind of want to do that, but they’ve done it so slowly and cautiously while also trying to keep the old fans that it’s not really working. At least not yet. And the problem with that is that these demographic woes along with the 2023 strikes mean they’re afraid to push it. So instead we’re about to get a slightly different kind of panic reaction…
Pinning Our Hopes on Deadpool?
Marvel and DC are both in a transitional period, trying to rebuild their glory days any way they can. The world has changed significantly, but they keep thinking that if they can just get the right mix of elements, the audiences will instantly come flooding back. Right now, DC is hoping that James Gunn has it figured out, while Marvel…well, they’re pinning their hopes on Deadpool. As a character, Deadpool gets to say things out loud that almost no one else can (She-Hulk did, but doesn’t get enough credit for that). So the first trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine makes it clear that the first fully-Disney Deadpool movie is being expected to “fix everything.” But will it?
What we can see about the current marketing coming out of Marvel is that they are trying to bolster their previous rapid nostalgia with real nostalgia. They’re bringing in the heavy-hitters, the characters that everyone thinks of as the most important Marvel icons other than Spider-Man: the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Marvel is certainly right to leverage these properties now that they own them, but at the moment it looks like they’re dropping nearly everything else to focus on those two things, squandering even the small amount of audience-building they’ve done with their new characters. X-Men ’97 is the most straightforward nostalgia-grab I’ve seen in the MCU’s history, but it’s already getting complaints from the online outrage machine. The first teaser poster has dropped for the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, and comment fights are already breaking out over the casting (mostly about Reed and Susan rather than Johnny and Ben, but still).
With all this, and given Deadpool 2‘s record of the same kill-them-immediately cameos that people complained about with Multiverse of Madness, the unmitigated optimism I have seen about Deadpool & Wolverine seems doomed already. Yes, it’s clearly going to bring in the X-Men on a larger scale than the MCU already has, and it’s probably going to set up Secret Wars, but will it do those things in a way that suddenly all these 30-something and 40-something whiny men are going to come running back to the theater to pour their money into every MCU property? Almost certainly not. As with Guardians 3 and even No Way Home, some individual movies may manage to catch that nostalgia lightning in a bottle, but they’re not going to be able to make it carry over into other properties the way it used to.
What I Want, But Probably Won’t Get
The most well-known Marvel character of all time is Spider-Man. Unfortunately, Sony is currently working hard to bury that end of the universe under a pile of IP-claiming garbage, with their animated films doing the heavy lifting of actually telling good stories that bring in the audiences. There continue to be rumors about a live-action Miles Morales movie, but will the Sony end of things even be functional by the time that comes around? Live-action Miles and Gwen would go a long way to bringing in the kinds of audiences that the MCU needs. If Sony were smart, this would be the main focus of all their effort. Sadly, Sony is not currently showing that they are smart.
On the TV side, Marvel has never done a monster-of-the-week kind of series, and I think that could help bring in younger audiences. Particularly if you built it as a teenage-heroes kind of thing a la Buffy. Specifically, I think they should do this with Squirrel Girl. It would be the perfect blend of serious and goofy, have plenty of fun, young characters, and offer huge crossover/cameo potential where Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye, and more could show up every once in a while and hint at the larger universe. (Also, live-action Ratatoskr. How cool would that be?)
I know I’m probably one of the few people who wants this, and that in itself makes me sad. Nevertheless, I’ll probably keep seeing Marvel movies in theaters. Well, not all the Sony ones. Gotta draw the line somewhere.
Eric the Unabridged 
Eat nuts and kick butts!
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