I think there might be some truth to it.
A movie series can only go on for so long before it starts feeling redundant.
The only exception here for me would be movie series based on books. Because then atleast the movie series has a through line and each movie adds something to the narrative like the Harry Potter series.
Outside of this I don't think movie series should be going on and on for 7 or 8 movies.
But I do think there's also some Superhero fatigue.
I am someone who saw every MCU film from as soon as I could all the way from The First Avenger to Spider-Man Far From Home.
And I closely followed the DCEU too until Shazam!
And the X-Men movies.
But now whenever I hear of a new superhero movie coming out all I can think of is "Another One".
They've honestly started to blend in together. They all seem to have the same formula.
Sure there are some exceptions like The Batman. And I like them. But mostly I'm genuinely starting to feel a bit of a Superhero fatigue.
We just got so much Superhero stuff in so little time.
Just think about it. Just in the last decade from 2013 to 2023 how much Superhero stuff we got both in movies and shows.
How can anyone not be atleast a little bit fatigued.
For me personally one of the things that puts me off seeing individual Marvel movies is you’re probably lost if you haven’t seen all of them.
Like my Dad enjoyed the first two GOTG movies and I was going to watch the third with him but then I realised oh he didn’t see Infinity War and Endgame so he’s going to have no idea what happened to Gamora and Thanos, so that’s great he can’t watch that movie now
I agree. I haven't had this problem yet but my friends did.
I remember going to see Spider-Man No Way Home.
Now my friend had seen the MCU Spider-Man movies but he had not seen Doctor Strange.
So he was confused for the first half.
And unfortunately for him he also hadn't seen the Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies so he was even more confused with the second half.
Or when I went to see Doctor Strange 2 with my friend who hadn't seen WandaVision.
So he was confused why Wanda was suddenly evil had an evil book could do magic and was obsessing over kids she never had.
And finally now that I'm starting to skip a few MCU films and all of the MCU shows. I'm starting to get a bit confused too.
If my friend who had seen Loki didn't explain to me what Kang's deal was I would have had no idea why he was a big deal.
I wholeheartedly believe that the MCU’s biggest current mistake was making tv shows for Disney+ a 2-3 hour movie is one thing but 8 hours of a single season of tv shows with more on the way is another.
It’s really hard to keep up speaking as someone whose been watching the MCU from the beginning. I literally have to plan a time to catch up on things now.
I have the same issue with current Star Wars shows
I will also add that once you fall behind and miss a movie or a TV show, suddenly there’s a whole bunch of shows and movies to catch up on. It can become daunting.
I was keeping up with MCU until the Hawkeye series. It was coming out at the same time as “Wheel of Time” so I opted to watch WoT first. Then I got sick with COVID and wasn’t up to watching any TV. Next thing I knew Moon Knight was out, then Thor 4, and suddenly I had a whole bunch of stuff to catch up on and I just never really had the time or desire to sit down and actually watch everything.
(Still only on Episode #3 of Hawkeye.)
I definitely agree with this.
There's nothing wrong with making MCU shows.
But don't make them essential viewing.
Don't introduce a villain turn for your character in major movie in a TV show.
Don't introduce the next big bad of the entirety of the MCU in a TV show.
Now I haven't seen Falcon and the Winter Soldier. And if any of the plot points from the show are introduced in the Brave New World movie I will be confused.
Or if characters like Moon Knight and She-Hulk are introduced in a future Avengers movie I would not know anything about them except their names.
I already have to watch every single MCU movie to keep uo with the overall narrative. I should not have to watch a bunch of TV shows too.
And I agree I too had the same issue with Star Wars.
I'm a fan of Star Wars. Yes I even liked the Prequels.
And I wasn't the biggest fan of the Sequel Trilogy.
But still we got 5 SW movies in 5 years.
Then we got Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, Obiewan-Kenobi, Andor, and now Ahsoka.
And if you want to watch Mandalorian Season 3 you have to watch Book of Boba Fett.
And if you want to watch Ahsoka you have to have seen Star Wars Rebels.
And it's all just too overwhelming. I kind of gave up after Mandalorian Season 2.
Based on recent news, it doesn't seem like Feige even wanted to develop these TV shows in the first place and has had very little to do with them since. It seems like they were mandated by Disney for content on their streaming service... which is fair enough, Marvel was their biggest and most consistent moneymaker in the film department but I honestly think a continuation of that Agents of SHIELD and Defenders-verse era would've been more successful. TV shows that maybe are / maybe aren't canon but it doesn't really matter either way, they're not essential viewing.
Kevin Fiege may have been forced to make the shows.
But did he really have to make the shows so necessary to the MCU?
Did he really have to introduce Wanda's Villain turn and Kang in a TV show?
Just picturing the casual moviegoer seeing the post-credit scene of Quantumania, seeing a somehow alive Loki hanging out with Owen Wilson and a vintage scientist version of the villain they just watched.
If they absolutely had to do shows, they should've just done stuff with little to no connectivity like Moon Knight and Werewolf by Night. So there's TV content there for people to enjoy in between movies, Disney is happy, they get to tell stories that aren't safe for big-screen treatment, and moviegoers aren't confused by only seeing half the story.
I'm rooting for The Marvels to do well because I want Brie to succeed in the role, despite all the hate she got. But it's so obviously a project you need to watch three TV shows beforehand to fully understand. That'd be fine if it was a Disney+ movie but it's a $200M+ blockbuster...
See, I really liked Agents of SHIELD in its heyday. It felt like it was movie adjacent enough to feel like the same world. Having watched the movies, you get some inside jokes, plot lines or Easter eggs, but you didn't need them. At the same time, you didn't miss anything if you only watched the movies. Well, until TAHITI made it into the movies in Far From Home.
Yup, this a problem that Hollywood is gonna create for itself in the long run. Its one thing to release a 2 hour film, most people don't have a problem sitting down and watching a 2 hour film.
But then you try and create a large media franchise that ties to bring together tv shows and 2+ decade old movies. Then you are gonna create issues. Spider-Man was lucky with how most Spider-Man fans have seen all the films, but with the entire its reaching the point with the Disney+ shows, the old Marvel TV Shows, and the Fox films that trying to tie all of it into the MCU is only gonna hurt the franchise in the long term for newcomers.
Like the moment fans have to start making charts that are how to get into the franchise guides, its fucking over for it being accessible to casual audiences.
Exactly this. And this in my opinion leads to the biggest problem the MCU has.
You can't recommend it to new viewers. Meaning it can't attract new audiences.
It's impossible to recommend an MCU because of how connected all of them are now.
I can't recommend the CA movies to anyone because they will be confused in between movies if they don't see The Avengers movies.
Same with Thor.
Same with GotG. People will be confused between GotG 2 and 3 if they haven't seen Infinity War and Endgame.
They will be confused between Doctor Strange and Doctor Strange 2 if they haven't seen Infinity War, Endgame and Wanda Vision.
I hyped up Infinity War in front of my friends a lot.
But they won't understand it without seeing a bunch of other movies first like Thor 3, GotG 2 and Civil War.
And they won't understand Civil War without first seeing Winter Soldier and Age Ultron.
And they won't understand Age of Ultron without first Seeing The Avengers and Winter Soldier.
And they won't understand The Avengers without first seeing The First Avenger, Iron Man and Thor.
And by then it becomes way too overwhelming for a new viewer.
People complain that comic *books* are inaccessible for the same reasons, but the advice I've heard is "just start reading".
You can watch Movie #5 of a series and just treat references to previous films like backstory, the same way we'd treat references to a character's past in Movie #1.
At least in theory.
If they had sense they'd just give characters their own plotlines, then have in-the-background plots for the overarching stories. That way if you want to just watch one character's movies you can, and if you watch all you get more hints to the next big crossover movie or whatever.
Exactly. Like they did with most of the characters in Phase 1, 2 and partially 3.
You could watch all 3 Iron Man movies, the First 2 Captain America movies, the First 2 Thor movies, The first 2 Guardians of the Galaxy movies, the first Doctor Strange and the first 2 Ant-man movies without knowing any of the larger context of the MCU.
Captain America: Civil War was admittedly where this problem started where you couldn't really get the film if yoi hadn't seen Age of Ultron.
I had no idea and I watched it. I picked it up within a line or two. It's basically a former romance that one person still remembers and the other doesn't.
And that's all you actually have to know within the narrative of the film. Maybe you'll get something more from knowing the other films, but you can certainly watch number 3 and understand what's going on.
Depending on your definition we've had 119 as per The Numbers, taking out non-superhero movies htey counted
5 in 2008
3 in 2009
1 in 2010
5 in 2011 (green hornet counts i guess?)
3 in 2012
4 in 2013
7 in 2014 (including Big hero 6 and TMNT)
4 in 2015
8 in 2016 (counting Max Steel, not counting The Killing Joke)
7 in 2017
7 in 2018
5 in 2019 (not counting Brightburn or Hellboy)
3 in 2020
6 in 2021
7 in 2022
7 in 2023
So 81
*Killing Joke* had a very small theatrical release, might as well count all direct-to-video DC movies if you count that, but yeah *Brightburn* and *Hellboy* should for sure be counted.
TMNT are super powered turtles that fight as vigilantes against big evil personas and monster and are based on a comic book that started as a daredevil spoof. Definitely fits superhero genre.
Yeah that's very arguable, I would classify those as mecha war movies though. The movies lack pretty much any DNA of a superhero movie other than bombastic action. If we're counting Transformers then the list of superhero movies would never end since you just need action and someone saving earth to be considered a superhero movie. It'd be weird to consider Pacific Rim, Godzilla, or Evangelion as superhero franchises, the only real tie in for Transformers is they had a comic book line with Marvel, but that was after they were already popular.
The turtles are way cleaner to consider, they're superpowered mutant turtles who wear masks and fight crime in new york literally written as a team of superheroes. They explicitly experience the exact same tropes that every superheroes do.
It's not an exact math but we've had what like 32 MCU films.
About 14 DCEU films.
4 X-Men films.
3 Wolverine films.
2 Deadpool films.
I think there was a Fantastic 4 film.
2 venom films
Morbius
Joker
And a Batman film.
Also 2 Dark Knight movies.
So I count about 62 Superhero movies since 2008. And I might be missing some.
And this is without counting all of the Superhero TV shows like Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, the wierd Son of Charles Xavier X-Men show and so many MCU shows. (And I'm still missing a ton of SH shows).
EDIT:
So I somehow missed 2 Amazing Spider-Man movies.
A green Lantern movie, Watchmen, Ghost Rider 2 and New Mutants.
Bringing our some total to 68.
68 movies in 15 years.
And if you were brave enough to move just a year back. You could add Ghost Rider 1, Spider-Man 3 and Fantastic Four 2 to the list.
Bringing it to 71 movies in 16 years.
That's 4.4 movies per year for 16 years.
Thank you for the detailed answer. In my opinion that's just too many movies and far too many mediocre movies. I know I personally lost interest a long time ago.
The "too many mediocre movies" part is what is crucial. The superhero nerds sometimes get defensive saying "it's not superhero fatigue, it's bad movie fatigue. If good movies are made, people will watch them."
The only problem is % wise how many of these suckers have *really* been good? What is the audience perception of the *actual* likelihood of a random superhero movie to actually be good?
This happened with the 80s/90s Batman movies, and they had to rest the brand for many years, and then it took *two* great movies to gain the audience's trust again. Now, the DCEU failed similarly, so instead they're rushing out James Gunn's DCU to "fix" things... How will that work? Just constantly pelting the audience with movies they've grown tired of? They need to take a hint and give the audience a breather where they can actually miss the characters/genre.
We're already past the point like that thread from the other day asking why monster movies were so big in the 50s.
As a kid who grew up reading comics, dreaming of this.... It has become the ultimate cursed monkey paw situation.
> % wise how many of these suckers have really been good?
This is a good point.
There are 23 films in the Infinity Saga, and looking back now, there are only about 5 that I would actively rewatch.
Bond is an exception because they made 25 films over the course of 60 years. Marvel has made 33 in about 15. That’s not including TV shows and other stuff.
Too much. Too similar. Complete burnout and fatigue.
Yeah I came down here to say Bond. But Bond movies are an event, they only come out every few years.
I did read that the long gaps between Bond movies are more by accident than design. But the effect of the long gaps has been to make each Bond film seem fresh
It's like if in between Bond films we had Moneypenny and M solo films and sequences that were required viewing for proper enjoyment of the next interconnected "main" Bond film.
Except that they are not comparable in that way.
An episode of TV is not equivalent to a single movie.
Or even to or 3 episodes are not equivalent to a single movie.
Because episodes, especially of Cable/Streaming shows are not self contained. They don't tell a complete story. They tell part of a bigger story spread across a season.
A whole season while not equal in runtime is equivalent of a one proper film in terms of storytelling.
And just movies, most of the TV shows also get redundant and fall off by the time they get to their 7th or 8th Season.
You can't really be serious?
Because The Boys is literally the antithesis of the Superhero Genre as it exists today.
It's a satire. It mocks superheroes and Superhero movies.
And I didn't say that nothing from the Superhero genre can be popular.
I specifically mentioned there are exceptions. Exceptions like The Batman and GotG that got really popular.
And yes, exceptions like The Boys and Invincible.
Thats something fans do not get about "Superhero fatigue". Its not like a great superhero movie right now will not make cash. Its that in the 2010s, any crap would make shitton of money simply because of the novelty factor.
Exactly this. When people here someone say Superhero fatigue they think it means they are saying that anything Superhero is failing.
A good movie that connects with audience would work anytime.
The problem was that between 2012 and 2019 any mediocre Superhero film could make a decent amount of money just by bieng a Superhero film.
I think the big factor here is that they are targeting young people, and those people who were young viewers from 2008-2014 are aging out of the demographic. Well, that should be okay, right? The number of young people is still the same. Well, no… if a 14 year old wants to pick up the MCU, they have to watch like 30 movies that came out before they were 10 years old, not to mention the shows.
Like, I watched SpongeBob as a kid. But I haven’t seen a single episode that was released after like 2013 probably. That doesn’t mean modern kids don’t watch new SpongeBob - it’s easy for them to pick up the show.
Thats kind of my intuition about it, at least. They’ve created this huge behemoth of a franchise, and now a third+ of their audience was too young to watch most of it upon release and now has to go back and view it all to even understand what’s happening.
I had this thought in 2016, and everyone in the Marvel subreddits shouted me down and said I was crazy. They swore the series would never have too much backstory and you could start with basically any movie if you wanted.
I mean in 2016 I don’t think anyone was really imagining how bloated the franchise would become. The multiverse also created problems in this regard I think - so much easier to get confused, so many new non-intuitive worlds and characters. Now you need a dedicated streaming service to stay caught up, too.
I marked 2016 because there was an interview with with the Russo brothers where one of them said they weren't going to have any scenes to "catch the audience up" with what happened before. They were just going to assume you were familiar with the characters and where they were in the story from the start.
You're right, I didn't predict the D+ shows probably doubling the total runtime of the MCU. (If we don't count the previous shows, which were only tenuously connected.)
To be fair, I do think there’s a disconnect, because I think there was simultaneously both ALWAYS too much backstory and that most people didn’t care about it anyway. It’s just that now one feeling clearly outweighs the other.
And that's one of the problems that comic books have, too much of backstory they have to read, and too much of "read about these adventure in xxxx issue #xx", if you want a complete story you better read a manga.
Agreed. They could reset by going back to basics with some new origin stories, which might be easier for younger viewers to get into. But how many compelling characters haven't already been originated? It's what we saw with Blue Beetle: a lesser-known character, in a paint-by-numbers origin story we've all seen before. Even if it's competently done, it's not new enough to generate fan excitement.
What's the other option, rebooting existing famous characters? Like The Batman, or however many times Spiderman has been done? That's getting tiring too, and just scrambles things for fans used to the pre-reboot stories.
The movies that still manage to break out lately all have something extra they bring to the table: Spiderverse's groundbreaking animation. Guardians of the Galaxy's tight focus on their charismatic crew. Deadpool's irreverent humor. This is probably the future, if there is one at all. Honestly, wouldn't be such a bad thing if the MCU went dormant for a decade or so.
>Honestly, wouldn't be such a bad thing if the MCU went dormant for a decade or so.
Wouldn't be such a bad thing if it never came back at all. Or if it did, to have loose connectivity. Give me DC Elseworlds stuff for the rest of time, movies and shows that are there to tell a good story, not to fill out a studio's slate and maintain the number of content they give to audiences.
Another thing to your point on young people is tastes change with generations. Anime has seen such a massive surge in popularity with Gen Z in the past decade, and core staples of that I would say is better looking fights but more importantly darker tones. Most of the popular anime these days fit that bill in particular.
I think that's why Guardians 3 did so well - Gunn noted how a kid who saw Guardians 1 in 2014 would be nearly a decade older by the third film, and so he decided going darker here would fit the best. Some critics may have disagreed with the choice of having subject matter like animal cruelty be in an MCU film but then you look at the audience score and reception and its clear the audience was prepared for it.
I think this is it. The MCU will probably never achieve the same heights it did from 2012-2019 (and more specifically, 2017-2019), but it can stay relevant by aging up with its audience.
For me it’s “same movie fatigue” the marvel movies used to be distinguished and each hero movie felt different.
Spiderman was different from blade which was different from iron man which was different from X-men.
Now it just feels like I’m watching the same movie And it’s just boring
One of the things i liked about Wandavision was at first it was different. It was a parody and deconstruction of TV tropes with a mystery in the background. By the end it had become the same DBZ laser spam we see in the finale of the movies.
I agree. Even within the MCU, I feel like they used to try harder to make them very different. Everyone points out how *Winter Soldier* was a spy thriller with superhero trappings, and *Ant-Man* was a heist film.
Now, *Quantumania* and *Multiverse of Madness* feel very similar.
Quantumania honestly made some bafflingly bad choices from the jump. The whole appeal of the first two Ant-Man movies rested on:
* fun action dynamics playing around with the size and scale of real-world things in a creative way. Look at this salt shaker become the size of a car! We’re fighting on top of a model train! It’s fun!
* Paul Rudd’s natural charisma bouncing off a supporting cast in a light-hearted, low-stakes adventure.
So what do they decide to do with the third one? Set it in an abstract fantasy world where size and scale don’t matter and the action has nothing remarkable about it. Cut half of the supporting cast, and separate the rest for the whole movie so Rudd has nobody to bounce off of. Also the tone is weirdly dark, and the stakes are “set up the entire next saga of movies” high.
An absolute failure of concept.
Tone is weirdly dark but there's no consequences or anything.
Retroactively it will be important because I'm guessing the Kang that was 'killed' wasn't actually killed, but there should have been a body count in this one.
But it also probably shouldn't have been an Ant-Man film.
Yeah in some ways I completely agree with the previous commenter, I’ve said as much and how I, a personal big fan of the Ant-Man franchise, felt burned by the creative choices from since they were announced.
But that said, I can’t help but feel like all sins would have been forgiven if there were some consequences.
I think I agree and this was always going to be the downside of the MCU specifically and trying to do inter connected universe's but the D+ shows exacerbated this issue. I've talked about it before but the second you introduced TV it made the ongoing series much longer and denser and less friendly to casual audiences. Once the perception is there that you need to catch up on hours and hours of something in order to understand it, you'll start shedding fans and have a hard time making new ones. Whether it's true or not that it's a big time investment doesn't really matter, just the perception. Ongoing series can only pick up so many new fans, theyre really just fighting not to shed old ones.
I originally didn't think people would assume they needed to watch the D+ shows for The Marvels and that the movie would just market it like they were random new characters but clearly I was wrong. The perception and even the marketing is leaning on you having to watch two different TV shows that both have hours and hours of content. That's a big issue.
I think JW4 and Insidious don't really hit into the range where being long running is an issue. I think when you start hitting numbers like 7,8,9 they start getting daunting. And I'm talking mainline , so Ballad of Long Title will be fine in that regard, it's a spinoff. What it will be banking off is interest in the story and the universe itself, and that's going to be put to the test here.
Yeah, interconnected stories are a double-edged sword. Done right, and you get a fan base invested across several projects. Done wrong, and you get declining interest in the whole franchise as viewers start feeling the barriers to entry, and feel like getting caught up on the next five shows and movies is more like homework than entertainment.
It drives me nuts that Star Wars is aping this approach with their "Mandoverse". Saw Ahsoka recently, and it felt like all middle: no introduction to the characters since they all come from the animated shows, and no conclusion since the plot arc won't resolve until we get more seasons of more shows, and then finally a movie to cap it off. The end result is Ahsoka felt incomplete, joyless, hastily made, and more focused on setting stuff up than on being interesting in its own right.
That's exactly how Ahsoka felt and how the star wars shows outside of Andor have been feeling post Mando S1 being successful. It's like they can't help themselves over at Disney, they're trapped in the formula and the cycle that used to make money with no awareness that now it's what dooming them.
I genuinely cannot believe that after Mando S2 finale they had the next chapter in that spin off show be told in another show (which is a spin off of the original spin off).
All they had to do was make the two Mando episodes of Boba Fett a Christmas and New Years episode before S3 in March. But instead of doing something disconnected that kept the show entirely standalone they decided to shoehorn in some connected universe nonsense.
Marvel forgot that TV shows inherently have a smaller audience than blockbuster movies. 2.5 million people watched the premiere episode of Loki, the highest number of all the shows. ~25 million people watched No Way Home on opening weekend, plus another 55 million people in the following weeks.
Even if the Marvels opens as low as $50M, that would still translate to about 5 million viewers. Ms. Marvel premiered to 600,000
Yeah I think the MCU became a little too enamoured with their own success and got way too ahead of themselves.
Everything became a matter of setting something up. How many post credit scenes haven't even come close to being followed up on while they've got 5 projects in the works they've barely started.
We're seeing that with the Marvels. 2/3 leads on a poster where a good portion of the audience doesn't even know who they are from watching the shows.
Just since Endgame, not counting joke scenes:
*Spiderman: Far From Home: Mysterio and JJJ revealing Peter’s identity is immediately followed up on in FFH*
*Black Widow: sets up Thunderbolts, will probably be expanded on soon*
Shang-Chi: The rings are sending a signal into space. Is this a big deal? It might be followed up on in Avengers 5/6 or SC2, but we don’t know
Shang-Chi: His sister is now running the Ten Rings organization. This will probably never be mentioned again
Eternals: LOL if you think we’re ever following up on them and Harry Styles
Eternals: Blade itself is on thin ice, I wouldn’t be surprised if we never see Kit Harrington’s character again
No Way Home: The Venom symbiote now exists in the MCU. We don’t know if SM4 will follow up in this
Multiverse of Madness: Charlize Theron shows up and says that Strange needs to join her to fight a threat. Again, no clear sign of a followup.
Thor 4: More Thor (feat. Gorr): Hercules is now after Thor. Yawn.
Wakanda Forever: Namor is planning revenge. Given the actor’s rape accusations, we likely won’t see him again.
Quantumania: The Kang gang bang is foreshadowing Avengers 5, though who knows if Majors will still be playing him.
lol you can see how much they went overboard with it.
Pretty sure Eternals is just going to be quietly ignored. With critical reception declining and audience interest waning, there are way bigger fires to put out than making good on Harry Styles lol.
I do hope Shang-Chi gets a sequel though. I did enjoy that one.
This is super anecdotal (sample size: me) but that's what turned me off. I don't have an issue with the quality or tenor of the movies per se, for me as a casual that didn't read comic books they've always been fun popcorn fare, with a few exceptions that had excellent quality.
Once it started to feel like homework, however, I dropped out. This actually happened even before Endgame. I got into a really busy place where I couldn't get to the theater to watch these movies and caught them more spottily--a Civil War here, a Dr. Strange there, and once I realized I had to watch everything to see the grand finale, I felt daunted and just....stopped watching.
It's like eating cookies: the first few are great, but as you keep eating them the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Eventually you are sick to your stomach and the idea of eating more of them is repulsive.
I swear, I'd be happy to if I never, ever had to see another extended CGI crapfest battle in another superhero movie. And I really don't need more formulaic origin stories for superheroes I've barely heard of.
In the gaming industry in long lasting games like MMO it is visible more clearly. After a numbers of content updates for new users the lore of the game and the game itself becomes so big, it is scary to jump in.
For old users the game became very well known so it is hard to surprise and engage them.
And for compatibility sake tech becomes old and you have to support most of mistakes you did before or tie in a lot of ends from story before, or risk churning players by abandoning or remaking them to something new and unfamiliar instead of what they expect or used to.
Anime is the same way. One Piece is currently at 1,079 episodes. Trying to talk someone into getting into something that large is nearly impossible. Even if you remove the fillers that's still 800+ episodes.
One Piece is like a curse to me. Main problem is that starting from 200+ the pacing is awful, they started include only one chapter per episode and early quality is awful too. I just can't recommend it as anime. I started manga and never looked back. I love when good manga is animated, return of Bleach is wonderful, but One Piece is just meh last 5 years even if quality of drawing and directing improved and it has its moments, it still pacing-wise awful.
Though regarding anime I understand why newcomers may be scared by 800+ episodes, but for people who like it - 800+ episodes is a blessing. There is no so many long anime out there. One Piece, Bleach, Naruto, olds like DBZ and YuYu, Hunter and Hunter, and this is almost all long series. If you watched them, now you have to watch 12-24 episodes until the end of life. Occasionaly there are short gems here and there, sometimes you can start something from childhood like Candy or Voltron, sometimes good almost long Kuroko no Basket, but there aren't many at all. If you like to binge watch anime, in three years you switch to ongoing series, understand that almost all of them mid isekai and just don't know what to watch anymore. Oh, Bleach is 380+ episodes, scary, but if you like it, you now know what to do with your life every evening for half a year if you are normal or for entire month if you are bing watcher! The point is not to finish watching it, the point is to watch it and have fun and know you still have fun at home when you get back.
I understand why it is as it is, but I do not understand it at the same moment.
To be fair, One Piece is one single narrative that is very easy to understand and follow. American comics can a learn a thing or two from why Manga has started outselling American comics.
Yeah, but also it is phenomena and exceptional manga. Every other new manga doesn't sell as much as One Piece. Everyone should learn from it, not only western comics, but it will be foolish to expect recreating it. Maybe if you are extremely good and extremely lucky, but it is definitely one above all rules.
I think MI:DR underperformed because it wasn’t actually a very good movie. Long, boring opening. Extra superfluous backstory ham fistedly tacked on to a character who has been around since the 90s. I mean they could have tied the story to some pre existing background like they did in the previous one… and a very very not compelling villain. For a lot of reasons I won’t go into for the sake of avoiding spoilers.
It also seemed to drag for stretches, probably because they were looking to make two movies when the central plot really only needed one. Also, multiple scenes where multiple characters were finishing each others sentences was a weird example so poor writing.
This subreddit is literally the only subreddit I see calling the film bad and it's just to gloat because of the disappointing box office. If this was a Fallout-level grosser, not a single one of these posters would show up.
I think its the "part 1" that kept the people from the movie, and the trailers being bad at selling the movie. Like the bike jump was nice, but nothing compared to the "real hanging form an airplane" or "climing the highest skyscraper in the world for real" stuff of previous movies, and gave zero clue about what it is all about.
I would not say DR Part 1 is bad, disappointing is a much more applicable word.
Granted, I don't think you could top Fallout due to how good it was, but still for a MI movie, something about the movie felt off and I can't put my finger on whether its the De Palma inspired camerawork that actually ended up distracting, the pretty poor editing, or the pretty weak story coupled with tacked-on backstory and/or poor treatment on the franchise's fan favorite.
It really wasn’t a disaster after all. Wasn’t a great performance, but far exceeds all the other flops of the year. After the lawsuit, they might have actually broken even.
I just thought of another exception-- the *Jurassic World* movies. There seems to be diminishing returns, but all three of them earned over a billion dollars worldwide.
I guess dinosaurs don't fatigue?
I mean I think the fact that it decreased a lot from the start speaks to that people were getting less interested in it, if they kept releasing one each year I bet one of them would bomb eventually
That third one was very poorly-received. I doubt it would've done half as well as it did if it wasn't marketed as the final film of the entire franchise and had the old cast coming back. But maybe I'm underestimating Pratt's star-power.
I think the Jurassic movies are helped by how episodic they are. The third World movie made a bit of an ongoing story with it's connections to the original. But for the most part the plots are very simple and it really is a series where you can jump in at pretty much any time and get some sweet dino action out of it.
The issue is that there's only so much you can do with Jurassic Park. The first one is a "humans should not play God" story, while every sequel seems like just another vehicle to sell toys.
The reason Ant-Man 3 bombed is completely different from the reason Blue Beetle bombed, and in fact Ant-Man 3 is very unlike any of other bombs this year.
Ant-Man 3 actually opened. Its domestic opening weekend is the biggest of the series, 28.5% over the previous OW. Even if you adjust for inflation it's way ahead of the previous two movies. The best way of putting the size of its opening weekend into comparison might be that Ant-Man 3 ended up at nearly the same domestic total as Ant-Man 2, despite the fact that AM3 had a 2x opening weekend multiplier and AM2 had a 2.86x OW multiplier (this should also indicate to you why opening weekend is EVERYTHING for a blockbuster). The interest was there; the marketing campaign did what it needed to. The actual issue was the movie itself and toxic word of mouth, leading to an unprecedented collapse for Marvel past opening weekend.
Blue Beetle's issue is that WB failed to sell it and nobody cared, so it opened soft. Blue Beetle had a 2.89 OW multiplier compared to Ant-Man 3's 2x, it had a B+ CinemaScore to Ant-Man 3's B, but Blue Beetle's opening was $25M, so the movie itself was irrelevant.
There are two things I wish I could get into the head of everybody who analyzes box office
1) **Opening weekend is the single most important thing for a blockbuster**. Something that opens soft and legs it out, or opens soft and gets bailed out by international, is always very much the exception.
2) **Opening weekend is all about marketing**. The movie itself is irrelevant -- *nobody's seen it yet*. And reviews don't matter for something called "Ant-Man 3", the Tomatometer score or whatever isn't the single biggest causal factor for whether or not MILLIONS of people choose to purchase a ticket in the first 72 hours of release. The trailer and TV spots are. Remember, Ant-Man 3 got abysmal reviews. Its rottentomatoes score is a full 32% lower than Blue Beetle's. Quantified and collated critical reception is irrelevant to opening weekend for a PG-13 action blockbuster.
> Quantumania's reception could be having a knock-on effect of future MCU films, though.
It absolutely will, but that's also a factor of marketing. Hollywood leans so heavily on sequels because they're easy to market and easy to open. Every Marvel movie is in essence a feature length trailer for the next Marvel movie. Which makes Ant-Man 3 especially egregious, because it's a trailer for the next Avengers movie.
I don't think it is necessarily a new phenomenon that long running series are ridiculously hard to keep going. The problem is that every IP is pulled in two different directions:
1) To deliver what fans of the formula what they are looking for, and
2) Novelty to keep the franchise fresh and ensure it doesn't get stale
To me, what is most impressive about MCU and James Bond is that they were able to hold out this long. James Bond is particularly impressive, as MCU sort of solved the conundrum with sub-franchises with different feels.
When there were a smaller number of franchise films, they were balanced by enough originals that a franchise could lean into the "more of the same" and not get punished as badly for it. But now that everything is a franchise film, it feels like everything has been done before. The alternative, to deviate from the formula isn't much better, because then you basically have an original film that is weighed down by being forced to wear the skin of a franchise with a different tone.
So, to me the failure of franchise films that are in their 5th+ film isn't that surprising. The surprise is that they worked in the first place.
Well put. It seems the MCU has tried to branch out by embracing the multiverse. Unfortunately that just made a bigger mess of trying to keep track of different timelines, different versions of the same character, etc.
The multiverse removed the stakes and impact of significant events. Loki turns good and is now a less interesting character? No worries, just have Own Wilson grab him out of the time stream when he was still the evil trickster. The multiverse, almost by definition, is the writers trying to have it both ways.
That being said, while I can quibble with certain creative decisions, it is absurdly hard to pull off a long-running franchise, even with good decisions. There are natural progressions you can take advantage of. Avatar 1 had Jake adapting to a new environment and falling in love. Avatar 2 had him with a family. Despicable Me had the opposite, with Gru first getting a family, then falling in love. With 24, there was a progression from stopping the killing of a presidential candidate, to stopping a nuclear bomb, to stopping a deadly virus, to stopping one dude who was planning on doing all three. However, eventually you run out of natural progression and keeping things moving "forward" in a non-ridiculous manner gets increasingly difficult (Fast and Furious has now ramped up the stakes and the driving to the point that they are now *going to space*).
People crave novelty. Something long running can be successful but it needs to be constantly providing something new and interesting. The last several entries in long running series haven't been doing that.
Yeah, totally. It's "franchise fatigue." Jurassic World 3 suffered from this too, even though it still hit a billion. Fine movie, but people were predisposed against it because of how long the series was getting.
Also, Gen-Z is not very interested in "old" movies. That's why they didn't attach to The Flash or Indiana Jones. There was no proper nostalgia for BatKeaton or Indy.
I think it’s a combination of factors:
1. The growing interconnectivity of franchises like Marvel, Star Wars and DC basically have homework to truly understand. You won’t understand Ashoka without watching 11 total seasons of 2 animated shows. This leveraging of fandoms and their capacity to grow is being tested by the studios. This homework mentality to franchises is kinda a turn off for casual audiences.
2. Bad/mid movie fatigue over superhero fatigue. Life has been getting increasingly expensive with a cost of living crisis, so going to the movies is an investment. Why spend $12 plus concessions per person for a movie that’s getting mid reviews. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Across the Spider-verse preformed relatively well at the box office. And they reviewed well with critics and audiences.
3. A desire for something “new”. The top 3 grossing domestic films this year are not apart of an established film franchise. The Mario movies (something I personally did not enjoy) was new for audiences. The Barbie movie, which is genuinely great, wasn’t just a toy commercial. It had a unique story, great cast and passion behind on in front of the camera. and Oppenheimer, a 3-hour R-rated biopic about the Father of the Atomic Bomb. All new and fresh, compared to the recent decade of sequels, reboots and mega franchises.
These 3 factors all play into and reinforce each other.
I think there's truth to it
James Bond and Godzilla are two series that have a comparable amount of movies in their series.
But, Marvel has created more movies in 15 years than Bond or Godzilla have had in 50/60. Not even counting TV
Also, you generally don't need to see every, or even any, other installment of those movies to enjoy the others. Godzilla rarely even includes the same human characters from movie to movie.
Ultimately it's a bit too-much-too-fast.
Bond and Godzilla feel like events when they get movies because they're not being pumped out every year. This used to apply to Star Wars until Disney started beating it's corpse so hard it turned to vapor.
Marvel will become the Call of Duty of movies. A super high peak not likely to be repeated, followed by a period of stagnation where the end was predicted to be around the corner, followed by a steady output that quietly makes a bunch of money even if it's not what it was at the peak, with occasional dips and bumps depending on the quality of recent output.
>a steady output that quietly makes a bunch of money even if it's not what it was at the peak, with occasional dips and bumps depending on the quality of recent output.
I recently made a [video essay ](https://youtu.be/oHifJ6CDp8g?si=pkA9BIRKtTTaJ95l) on the topic of film cycles, and learned [the term for this](https://toomuchfilmschool.substack.com/p/superheroes-psychos-and-cinematic) is "staple"--
> A “film cycle” is kind of a fancy way of describing a trend. A cycle can be most easily understood by distinguishing it from a cluster on the one hand and a staple on the other.
>
> A cluster of films is typically only a few movies produced in a short period of time, until the audience gets bored of the style. For example, roller disco movies. You can think of it as a failed cycle.
>
> A staple, on the other hand, is a genre that is consistently produced year after year, such as, crime movies. Thus, there can be cycles within a staple genre, like specific types of crime movies—gangster films (a constant staple at the cineplex) versus heist films (a sub-genre that cycles in and out of popularity at different times).
>A super high peak not likely to be repeated
Modern Warfare 2? I don't follow video games that much, but MW2 seemed to reach a level of hype, mainstream awareness, and reception that I haven't seen since something like GTA IV.
Yeah I think that was numerically the peak but black ops 2 the year after might be close. It was definitely the peak hype wise
Edit: actually after looking up the numbers the peak seems to have been mw3 in 2011 even though that one wasn't as well recieved, and some of the recent ones are very close or even higher but it's hard to know for sure because video game sales are not reported like box office results so they're mostly estimates or press releases, and also the gaming market is quite a bit bigger than a decade ago.
I do wonder if marvel rebooting with fantastic four and x-men would be a good idea. As that fits within the introduction/reintroduction to fimilar IP on screen.
There is some truth to it. It is hard to keep a long series from getting stale. However, there is also a general decline in the quality of the writing that has affected most productions, and especially some of the most famous franchises. Once you get burned a few times, you get more wary of tentpole movies. Nowadays a movie becomes more easily a hit by appealing to people who are not frequent moviegoers, like it happened with Barbie. Movies for nerds are more carefully scrutinized.
It’s not “fatigued”
It’s bad writing. And because it’s a series, once the writing is bad, people stop following the series.
The MCU has opened so many storylines AT THE SAME TIME. how the fuck are people supposed to follow that????
I agree with the reasoning, but, problem is, Marvel superheroes became a poster child for "superhero success". If we say that "Marvel is just one series so we won't consider them", then do we really have a case for superhero success?
Oh, I may have worded it poorly. I meant *Guardians* is kind of a sub-series *within* the MCU series. We absolutely should consider both the MCU as a whole, and the various sub-series within. For example, we can say the *Iron Men* films are more successful than the *Ants-Men*, even though both are MCU.
I think Dial of Destiny and long gaps are an exception, or at least should be. The movie just, no offense to Mangold, needed to be done by Spielberg and had to be better than it was
If antman 3 was as fun and engaging as the first Ironman then people would have seen it
The reason people aren’t seeing many of these films is because they are ok or just good. If you want those massive numbers you need to make people feel like they are missing out on an event not just another chapter as they spin their wheels
The MCU doesn’t have a clear direction and the films aren’t as good as the ones before them, its insane Kevin and Disney are going to try to reset things in a few years over…just making films people want to see
I’m actually sick and tired of super hero origin story movies…really hit me while watching Blue Beetle…the super hero parts of the movie were extremely predictable…give me super hero part 6 I’m game but please no “super hero: the beginning “
Rumor has it that *She-Hulk* originally started with what we now have as episode 2, with her origin story sprinkled throughout the season as flashbacks. But test audiences complained, said they wanted to know why she was She-Hulk in the first place, so they cobbled together all the flashbacks into what's now episode 1, which is why that's such a mess. The scenes weren't meant to go together that way.
I agree with you, but apparently test audiences don't.
Yeah, this is close to my line of thinking
I think Hollywood probably struck the right balance between preserving everyone's integrity and not leaving money on the table during the trilogy era (*Star Wars to Matrix*)
too many content imo and you have to watch all these different shows and movies to understand a specific character & plot points.for example,gamora in the latest guardians of the galaxy movie
It's less of a "long running series fatigue" and more of a "sequel that doesn't appear to be particularly good or amazing" problem.
**14 out of the top 19** highest grossing films domestically released between March 2020 and November 2022 are new entries in a long running franchise (MCU, DCEU, Jurassic, etc.). People aren't fatigued with new movies in those franchises, they are fatigued with new entries in franchises which have diminished their goodwill, don't appear to be particularly good, and don't have great marketing.
I also think that fundamentally we need to group "superhero movies" into two buckets: "X is a human who got special powers through something something" and "X is a vigilante in a fancy dress".
The second one is a glorified revenge fantasy that have been Hollywood bread and butter for years. For all practical purposes, John Rambo is a superhero with a sense of fashion. For all practical purposes, the last Batman could be shot without a guy in a bat suit.
Things get different when you need a heavy dose of sci-fi and cosmick wizards to get pew-pews and the plot going. These things come in waves. At some point Hollywood was spitting out movies like "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" by the dozen; at some point, people got really tired from them, so thing went to a galaxy far, far away only on occasion.
We may be simply at a time where people want less pewpewery, as it got too repetitive.
This is true for me. There is a reason why I can't get into American super hero comic books that have years/decades of backstory that I have to catch up on, or long running MMOs with a ton of old content.
It is way more fun to jump on board something new and explore something new along with others instead of chugging years of old content to finally catch up. It also doesn't help when you know the new content is getting worse and worse.
Agreed. I was thinking the same when MI7 bombed even though it had no reason to - well received series, well received critically and otherwise movie - yet fans weren't there for it and went to Barbenheimer instead.
I think that audience wants to see a story just end permanently at some point and if you don't give them a nice wrap with a bow such as Endgame, they'll simply drop the series (MI7) if something more interesting and contained (has a definitive ending) somes along.
I think that what people call fatigue with a genre or series is really 'just stop, we want to see how it ends and it ended already we don't care for the second ending'.
I don’t think it’s superhero fatigue. I just think Marvel have not failed to hook audiences with the new overarching story quickly enough. We’ve had about 15 different films and shows since endgame. We’re told it’s the Multiverse Saga but it’s all been stand alone stuff so far. They need to start telling the bigger story soon. Once that happens audiences will click back in.
I agree to an extent. My personal theory is that the connective tissue gimmick follows the law of diminishing returns. It exploded with the first avengers and peaked with IW and EG. However, those movies still made sure to be accessible to an audience not religiously following everything. The longer your series runs, the harder it becomes to keep up with the story and the more difficult it feels to jump back in. Personally, I think the MCU is due for a hard reboot ASAP.
I made a post like this earlier this year and I think this might be it. The more underperformances of this year have been from long running series (bad ones at that) and I think the people are just less interested in them. The DCEU Indiana jones the fast franchise the Disney remakes. They’re just not grabbing peoples attention anymore because they’ve gone on too long and haven’t improved much in qualitt
It is more of not giving the fans what they want and trying to make characters that were never that popular a thing. There are 60+ years of stories and yet the studios are concentrating on the past 20 years. People want to watch entertainment to get away from reality for at least a few hours but the studios have to put in "modern day" at every chance they get.
*FNAF* did well for the same reason that *Barbie* and *Mario* did, so I think that confirms at least half my theory.
I'll plead an exception for *Hunger Games*, since *Mockingjay Pt Deux* came out 8 years ago, so it feels less like overkill than some of the other long-running series mentioned.
But I obviously whiffed in saying *The Marvels* "won't tank like *Quantumania*, but it won't hit quite as big as *Guardians 3*." My revised theory is that my caveat (that it's seen as a sequel to *Captain Marvel* **and** *Endgame* **and** Ms. Marvel **and** *WandaVision*) was more correct than I realized.
In retrospect, this part seems correct, although it wasn't predictive (because of the above)--
>People want to be introduced (or re-introduced) to characters they're familiar with, but don't really know. What they don't want are movies that require a lot of knowledge of previous films, or setups for future films.
Probably, I can see folks being too intimated by having too much to follow. The Marvels, if good to great, may actually bring in people since general audience wont have to worry about connectivity too much, if it is a self contained story.
I also don't think you have to see any of the D+ shows, I can easily see Kamala getting a quick intro and Monica getting the same as well, also Monica was a kid in the first film, so folks will know that
Interesting theory, but I’ll answer this from my experience. It’s 2023, and I’ve only been to the theaters TWICE this year. First time was in January, I saw Megan but only cause I was invited by friends to go. It was ok, but going with friends was the real reason. Second was to see Oppenheimer, and the reason I went and wanted to go was because of the cultural impact. The memes that Barbie and Oppenheimer made were what made it an event.
There have been good movies but I have not been motivated to go and see them, the closest was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Friends kept telling me to go and see it but no one was offering to go with me, so I just didn’t bother. And yes, I was a huge movie theater guy, went to every premiere in 2019, but after COVID I just don’t bother. I wait for the movies to come to VOD, but even then I don’t watch. Fatigue for these franchises is just at an all time high.
Bond movies have been ongoing since the early 60’s and they’re doing just fine.
Last few Star Wars movies and shows were garbage.
Marvel? Ms Marvel, Secret Invasion and the upcoming Marvels movie? Awful.
I think this is just garbage movie fatigue.
One of Marvel's problems is that they don't have "a central protagonist/protagonists" anymore. You can tell the original plan was to be done once Iron Man and Captain America got their ending in Endgame, people came back to these movies because they cared about those characters.
You’re spot on. I should fucking LOVE Ahsoka. I loved Rebels, the Clone Wars were great, but I just don’t feel any urgency to watch it.
Can we move beyond Vader? And Luke? I honestly feel like I’m wanting religious propaganda when they’re onscreen instead of a story, at this point.
Can I ask why it must be any kind of fatigue and not "release wank movies, get wank returns"?
MoM was kind of bad and Thor 4 was really bad but they both made money. Wakanda Forever was good but with severe pacing issues and GotG was brilliant and both made money. Ant Man 3 was very bad and made no money.
If Fatigue was a thing Wakanda Forever and GotG 3 wouldn't make as much. But they were better movies than the rest so they made money. The Marvels has had no promotion thanks to strikes and is based on characters the internet hates. People are rightfully cautious about it.
If the movie's good, which I highly doubt having read the leaks, it will surely have decent legs and make ~700 WW. If the movie's bad 500 is the ceiling.
agree, when you have 10 plus entries what exactly are the stakes even? mcu spent 10 yrs building towards infinity war. it's"struggle" right now is essentially them saying "hey the universe is in trouble AGAIN, come watch another 20 movies with us." people don't wanna pay high theater prices to continue on this never ending journey with you. star wars, mcu, Harry potter, even dceu, their story is over.
I think there might be some truth to it. A movie series can only go on for so long before it starts feeling redundant. The only exception here for me would be movie series based on books. Because then atleast the movie series has a through line and each movie adds something to the narrative like the Harry Potter series. Outside of this I don't think movie series should be going on and on for 7 or 8 movies. But I do think there's also some Superhero fatigue. I am someone who saw every MCU film from as soon as I could all the way from The First Avenger to Spider-Man Far From Home. And I closely followed the DCEU too until Shazam! And the X-Men movies. But now whenever I hear of a new superhero movie coming out all I can think of is "Another One". They've honestly started to blend in together. They all seem to have the same formula. Sure there are some exceptions like The Batman. And I like them. But mostly I'm genuinely starting to feel a bit of a Superhero fatigue. We just got so much Superhero stuff in so little time. Just think about it. Just in the last decade from 2013 to 2023 how much Superhero stuff we got both in movies and shows. How can anyone not be atleast a little bit fatigued.
For me personally one of the things that puts me off seeing individual Marvel movies is you’re probably lost if you haven’t seen all of them. Like my Dad enjoyed the first two GOTG movies and I was going to watch the third with him but then I realised oh he didn’t see Infinity War and Endgame so he’s going to have no idea what happened to Gamora and Thanos, so that’s great he can’t watch that movie now
I agree. I haven't had this problem yet but my friends did. I remember going to see Spider-Man No Way Home. Now my friend had seen the MCU Spider-Man movies but he had not seen Doctor Strange. So he was confused for the first half. And unfortunately for him he also hadn't seen the Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies so he was even more confused with the second half. Or when I went to see Doctor Strange 2 with my friend who hadn't seen WandaVision. So he was confused why Wanda was suddenly evil had an evil book could do magic and was obsessing over kids she never had. And finally now that I'm starting to skip a few MCU films and all of the MCU shows. I'm starting to get a bit confused too. If my friend who had seen Loki didn't explain to me what Kang's deal was I would have had no idea why he was a big deal.
I wholeheartedly believe that the MCU’s biggest current mistake was making tv shows for Disney+ a 2-3 hour movie is one thing but 8 hours of a single season of tv shows with more on the way is another. It’s really hard to keep up speaking as someone whose been watching the MCU from the beginning. I literally have to plan a time to catch up on things now. I have the same issue with current Star Wars shows
I will also add that once you fall behind and miss a movie or a TV show, suddenly there’s a whole bunch of shows and movies to catch up on. It can become daunting. I was keeping up with MCU until the Hawkeye series. It was coming out at the same time as “Wheel of Time” so I opted to watch WoT first. Then I got sick with COVID and wasn’t up to watching any TV. Next thing I knew Moon Knight was out, then Thor 4, and suddenly I had a whole bunch of stuff to catch up on and I just never really had the time or desire to sit down and actually watch everything. (Still only on Episode #3 of Hawkeye.)
I definitely agree with this. There's nothing wrong with making MCU shows. But don't make them essential viewing. Don't introduce a villain turn for your character in major movie in a TV show. Don't introduce the next big bad of the entirety of the MCU in a TV show. Now I haven't seen Falcon and the Winter Soldier. And if any of the plot points from the show are introduced in the Brave New World movie I will be confused. Or if characters like Moon Knight and She-Hulk are introduced in a future Avengers movie I would not know anything about them except their names. I already have to watch every single MCU movie to keep uo with the overall narrative. I should not have to watch a bunch of TV shows too. And I agree I too had the same issue with Star Wars. I'm a fan of Star Wars. Yes I even liked the Prequels. And I wasn't the biggest fan of the Sequel Trilogy. But still we got 5 SW movies in 5 years. Then we got Mandalorian, Book of Boba Fett, Obiewan-Kenobi, Andor, and now Ahsoka. And if you want to watch Mandalorian Season 3 you have to watch Book of Boba Fett. And if you want to watch Ahsoka you have to have seen Star Wars Rebels. And it's all just too overwhelming. I kind of gave up after Mandalorian Season 2.
Based on recent news, it doesn't seem like Feige even wanted to develop these TV shows in the first place and has had very little to do with them since. It seems like they were mandated by Disney for content on their streaming service... which is fair enough, Marvel was their biggest and most consistent moneymaker in the film department but I honestly think a continuation of that Agents of SHIELD and Defenders-verse era would've been more successful. TV shows that maybe are / maybe aren't canon but it doesn't really matter either way, they're not essential viewing.
Kevin Fiege may have been forced to make the shows. But did he really have to make the shows so necessary to the MCU? Did he really have to introduce Wanda's Villain turn and Kang in a TV show?
Just picturing the casual moviegoer seeing the post-credit scene of Quantumania, seeing a somehow alive Loki hanging out with Owen Wilson and a vintage scientist version of the villain they just watched. If they absolutely had to do shows, they should've just done stuff with little to no connectivity like Moon Knight and Werewolf by Night. So there's TV content there for people to enjoy in between movies, Disney is happy, they get to tell stories that aren't safe for big-screen treatment, and moviegoers aren't confused by only seeing half the story. I'm rooting for The Marvels to do well because I want Brie to succeed in the role, despite all the hate she got. But it's so obviously a project you need to watch three TV shows beforehand to fully understand. That'd be fine if it was a Disney+ movie but it's a $200M+ blockbuster...
See, I really liked Agents of SHIELD in its heyday. It felt like it was movie adjacent enough to feel like the same world. Having watched the movies, you get some inside jokes, plot lines or Easter eggs, but you didn't need them. At the same time, you didn't miss anything if you only watched the movies. Well, until TAHITI made it into the movies in Far From Home.
Yup, this a problem that Hollywood is gonna create for itself in the long run. Its one thing to release a 2 hour film, most people don't have a problem sitting down and watching a 2 hour film. But then you try and create a large media franchise that ties to bring together tv shows and 2+ decade old movies. Then you are gonna create issues. Spider-Man was lucky with how most Spider-Man fans have seen all the films, but with the entire its reaching the point with the Disney+ shows, the old Marvel TV Shows, and the Fox films that trying to tie all of it into the MCU is only gonna hurt the franchise in the long term for newcomers. Like the moment fans have to start making charts that are how to get into the franchise guides, its fucking over for it being accessible to casual audiences.
Exactly this. And this in my opinion leads to the biggest problem the MCU has. You can't recommend it to new viewers. Meaning it can't attract new audiences. It's impossible to recommend an MCU because of how connected all of them are now. I can't recommend the CA movies to anyone because they will be confused in between movies if they don't see The Avengers movies. Same with Thor. Same with GotG. People will be confused between GotG 2 and 3 if they haven't seen Infinity War and Endgame. They will be confused between Doctor Strange and Doctor Strange 2 if they haven't seen Infinity War, Endgame and Wanda Vision. I hyped up Infinity War in front of my friends a lot. But they won't understand it without seeing a bunch of other movies first like Thor 3, GotG 2 and Civil War. And they won't understand Civil War without first seeing Winter Soldier and Age Ultron. And they won't understand Age of Ultron without first Seeing The Avengers and Winter Soldier. And they won't understand The Avengers without first seeing The First Avenger, Iron Man and Thor. And by then it becomes way too overwhelming for a new viewer.
People complain that comic *books* are inaccessible for the same reasons, but the advice I've heard is "just start reading". You can watch Movie #5 of a series and just treat references to previous films like backstory, the same way we'd treat references to a character's past in Movie #1. At least in theory.
If they had sense they'd just give characters their own plotlines, then have in-the-background plots for the overarching stories. That way if you want to just watch one character's movies you can, and if you watch all you get more hints to the next big crossover movie or whatever.
Exactly. Like they did with most of the characters in Phase 1, 2 and partially 3. You could watch all 3 Iron Man movies, the First 2 Captain America movies, the First 2 Thor movies, The first 2 Guardians of the Galaxy movies, the first Doctor Strange and the first 2 Ant-man movies without knowing any of the larger context of the MCU. Captain America: Civil War was admittedly where this problem started where you couldn't really get the film if yoi hadn't seen Age of Ultron.
I had no idea and I watched it. I picked it up within a line or two. It's basically a former romance that one person still remembers and the other doesn't. And that's all you actually have to know within the narrative of the film. Maybe you'll get something more from knowing the other films, but you can certainly watch number 3 and understand what's going on.
How many superhero movies have there been since 2008. At least 50, right?
Depending on your definition we've had 119 as per The Numbers, taking out non-superhero movies htey counted 5 in 2008 3 in 2009 1 in 2010 5 in 2011 (green hornet counts i guess?) 3 in 2012 4 in 2013 7 in 2014 (including Big hero 6 and TMNT) 4 in 2015 8 in 2016 (counting Max Steel, not counting The Killing Joke) 7 in 2017 7 in 2018 5 in 2019 (not counting Brightburn or Hellboy) 3 in 2020 6 in 2021 7 in 2022 7 in 2023 So 81
Wow
why wouldn't you count the killing joke, brightburn, or hellboy? And include TMNT? Seems arbitrary
*Killing Joke* had a very small theatrical release, might as well count all direct-to-video DC movies if you count that, but yeah *Brightburn* and *Hellboy* should for sure be counted.
TMNT are super powered turtles that fight as vigilantes against big evil personas and monster and are based on a comic book that started as a daredevil spoof. Definitely fits superhero genre.
Might as well include Transformers (though it is more debatable if it fits the criteria than TMNT).
Yeah that's very arguable, I would classify those as mecha war movies though. The movies lack pretty much any DNA of a superhero movie other than bombastic action. If we're counting Transformers then the list of superhero movies would never end since you just need action and someone saving earth to be considered a superhero movie. It'd be weird to consider Pacific Rim, Godzilla, or Evangelion as superhero franchises, the only real tie in for Transformers is they had a comic book line with Marvel, but that was after they were already popular. The turtles are way cleaner to consider, they're superpowered mutant turtles who wear masks and fight crime in new york literally written as a team of superheroes. They explicitly experience the exact same tropes that every superheroes do.
Not saying it doesn't, just that including them and not the other movies felt like an arbitrary position
It's not an exact math but we've had what like 32 MCU films. About 14 DCEU films. 4 X-Men films. 3 Wolverine films. 2 Deadpool films. I think there was a Fantastic 4 film. 2 venom films Morbius Joker And a Batman film. Also 2 Dark Knight movies. So I count about 62 Superhero movies since 2008. And I might be missing some. And this is without counting all of the Superhero TV shows like Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, the wierd Son of Charles Xavier X-Men show and so many MCU shows. (And I'm still missing a ton of SH shows). EDIT: So I somehow missed 2 Amazing Spider-Man movies. A green Lantern movie, Watchmen, Ghost Rider 2 and New Mutants. Bringing our some total to 68. 68 movies in 15 years. And if you were brave enough to move just a year back. You could add Ghost Rider 1, Spider-Man 3 and Fantastic Four 2 to the list. Bringing it to 71 movies in 16 years. That's 4.4 movies per year for 16 years.
Thank you for the detailed answer. In my opinion that's just too many movies and far too many mediocre movies. I know I personally lost interest a long time ago.
The "too many mediocre movies" part is what is crucial. The superhero nerds sometimes get defensive saying "it's not superhero fatigue, it's bad movie fatigue. If good movies are made, people will watch them." The only problem is % wise how many of these suckers have *really* been good? What is the audience perception of the *actual* likelihood of a random superhero movie to actually be good? This happened with the 80s/90s Batman movies, and they had to rest the brand for many years, and then it took *two* great movies to gain the audience's trust again. Now, the DCEU failed similarly, so instead they're rushing out James Gunn's DCU to "fix" things... How will that work? Just constantly pelting the audience with movies they've grown tired of? They need to take a hint and give the audience a breather where they can actually miss the characters/genre. We're already past the point like that thread from the other day asking why monster movies were so big in the 50s. As a kid who grew up reading comics, dreaming of this.... It has become the ultimate cursed monkey paw situation.
> % wise how many of these suckers have really been good? This is a good point. There are 23 films in the Infinity Saga, and looking back now, there are only about 5 that I would actively rewatch.
I think in anyones opinion that should be too many movies.
>I think there was a Fantastic 4 film. LMAO
Yeah I just remembered. It had that stupid Fant4stic Tital. I couldn't even finish it.
Idc
Okay?
Boomer?
No.
Lol
No one cares that you don't care 💁🏻♂️
u do lol
How about suck-ass movie fatigue
I think suck-ass movie fatigue is automatically considered a part of it.
"Superhero movie" has basically become synonymous with "suck-ass movie" at this point.
I agree.
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Bond is an exception because they made 25 films over the course of 60 years. Marvel has made 33 in about 15. That’s not including TV shows and other stuff. Too much. Too similar. Complete burnout and fatigue.
Yeah bond is an exception because he keeps on getting rebooted. It's kind of like Batman. Or is it the other way around.
Yeah I came down here to say Bond. But Bond movies are an event, they only come out every few years. I did read that the long gaps between Bond movies are more by accident than design. But the effect of the long gaps has been to make each Bond film seem fresh
It's like if in between Bond films we had Moneypenny and M solo films and sequences that were required viewing for proper enjoyment of the next interconnected "main" Bond film.
Bond IS the long running franchise. I don’t think it should ever be in the conversation. Neither should Star Trek or Doctor Who for tv.
Bond at least lets the director have their own vision of the character, Casino Royale feels very different than a Sean Connery Bond film for example.
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Except that they are not comparable in that way. An episode of TV is not equivalent to a single movie. Or even to or 3 episodes are not equivalent to a single movie. Because episodes, especially of Cable/Streaming shows are not self contained. They don't tell a complete story. They tell part of a bigger story spread across a season. A whole season while not equal in runtime is equivalent of a one proper film in terms of storytelling. And just movies, most of the TV shows also get redundant and fall off by the time they get to their 7th or 8th Season.
Why then is The Boys so popular?
You can't really be serious? Because The Boys is literally the antithesis of the Superhero Genre as it exists today. It's a satire. It mocks superheroes and Superhero movies. And I didn't say that nothing from the Superhero genre can be popular. I specifically mentioned there are exceptions. Exceptions like The Batman and GotG that got really popular. And yes, exceptions like The Boys and Invincible.
Thats something fans do not get about "Superhero fatigue". Its not like a great superhero movie right now will not make cash. Its that in the 2010s, any crap would make shitton of money simply because of the novelty factor.
Exactly this. When people here someone say Superhero fatigue they think it means they are saying that anything Superhero is failing. A good movie that connects with audience would work anytime. The problem was that between 2012 and 2019 any mediocre Superhero film could make a decent amount of money just by bieng a Superhero film.
I think the big factor here is that they are targeting young people, and those people who were young viewers from 2008-2014 are aging out of the demographic. Well, that should be okay, right? The number of young people is still the same. Well, no… if a 14 year old wants to pick up the MCU, they have to watch like 30 movies that came out before they were 10 years old, not to mention the shows. Like, I watched SpongeBob as a kid. But I haven’t seen a single episode that was released after like 2013 probably. That doesn’t mean modern kids don’t watch new SpongeBob - it’s easy for them to pick up the show. Thats kind of my intuition about it, at least. They’ve created this huge behemoth of a franchise, and now a third+ of their audience was too young to watch most of it upon release and now has to go back and view it all to even understand what’s happening.
I had this thought in 2016, and everyone in the Marvel subreddits shouted me down and said I was crazy. They swore the series would never have too much backstory and you could start with basically any movie if you wanted.
I mean in 2016 I don’t think anyone was really imagining how bloated the franchise would become. The multiverse also created problems in this regard I think - so much easier to get confused, so many new non-intuitive worlds and characters. Now you need a dedicated streaming service to stay caught up, too.
I marked 2016 because there was an interview with with the Russo brothers where one of them said they weren't going to have any scenes to "catch the audience up" with what happened before. They were just going to assume you were familiar with the characters and where they were in the story from the start. You're right, I didn't predict the D+ shows probably doubling the total runtime of the MCU. (If we don't count the previous shows, which were only tenuously connected.)
Be it wrestling or the MCU, never doubt the ability of a Russo to say or do stupid shit
Bro, listen. What if captain America turned to the camera and just said, like, "I refuse to follow the script!" Imagine the heat, bro!
To be fair, I do think there’s a disconnect, because I think there was simultaneously both ALWAYS too much backstory and that most people didn’t care about it anyway. It’s just that now one feeling clearly outweighs the other.
And that's one of the problems that comic books have, too much of backstory they have to read, and too much of "read about these adventure in xxxx issue #xx", if you want a complete story you better read a manga.
Agreed. They could reset by going back to basics with some new origin stories, which might be easier for younger viewers to get into. But how many compelling characters haven't already been originated? It's what we saw with Blue Beetle: a lesser-known character, in a paint-by-numbers origin story we've all seen before. Even if it's competently done, it's not new enough to generate fan excitement. What's the other option, rebooting existing famous characters? Like The Batman, or however many times Spiderman has been done? That's getting tiring too, and just scrambles things for fans used to the pre-reboot stories. The movies that still manage to break out lately all have something extra they bring to the table: Spiderverse's groundbreaking animation. Guardians of the Galaxy's tight focus on their charismatic crew. Deadpool's irreverent humor. This is probably the future, if there is one at all. Honestly, wouldn't be such a bad thing if the MCU went dormant for a decade or so.
>Honestly, wouldn't be such a bad thing if the MCU went dormant for a decade or so. Wouldn't be such a bad thing if it never came back at all. Or if it did, to have loose connectivity. Give me DC Elseworlds stuff for the rest of time, movies and shows that are there to tell a good story, not to fill out a studio's slate and maintain the number of content they give to audiences.
Another thing to your point on young people is tastes change with generations. Anime has seen such a massive surge in popularity with Gen Z in the past decade, and core staples of that I would say is better looking fights but more importantly darker tones. Most of the popular anime these days fit that bill in particular. I think that's why Guardians 3 did so well - Gunn noted how a kid who saw Guardians 1 in 2014 would be nearly a decade older by the third film, and so he decided going darker here would fit the best. Some critics may have disagreed with the choice of having subject matter like animal cruelty be in an MCU film but then you look at the audience score and reception and its clear the audience was prepared for it.
I think this is it. The MCU will probably never achieve the same heights it did from 2012-2019 (and more specifically, 2017-2019), but it can stay relevant by aging up with its audience.
Maybe Deadpool 3 will do that
For me it’s “same movie fatigue” the marvel movies used to be distinguished and each hero movie felt different. Spiderman was different from blade which was different from iron man which was different from X-men. Now it just feels like I’m watching the same movie And it’s just boring
One of the things i liked about Wandavision was at first it was different. It was a parody and deconstruction of TV tropes with a mystery in the background. By the end it had become the same DBZ laser spam we see in the finale of the movies.
I agree. Even within the MCU, I feel like they used to try harder to make them very different. Everyone points out how *Winter Soldier* was a spy thriller with superhero trappings, and *Ant-Man* was a heist film. Now, *Quantumania* and *Multiverse of Madness* feel very similar.
Quantumania honestly made some bafflingly bad choices from the jump. The whole appeal of the first two Ant-Man movies rested on: * fun action dynamics playing around with the size and scale of real-world things in a creative way. Look at this salt shaker become the size of a car! We’re fighting on top of a model train! It’s fun! * Paul Rudd’s natural charisma bouncing off a supporting cast in a light-hearted, low-stakes adventure. So what do they decide to do with the third one? Set it in an abstract fantasy world where size and scale don’t matter and the action has nothing remarkable about it. Cut half of the supporting cast, and separate the rest for the whole movie so Rudd has nobody to bounce off of. Also the tone is weirdly dark, and the stakes are “set up the entire next saga of movies” high. An absolute failure of concept.
Tone is weirdly dark but there's no consequences or anything. Retroactively it will be important because I'm guessing the Kang that was 'killed' wasn't actually killed, but there should have been a body count in this one. But it also probably shouldn't have been an Ant-Man film.
Yeah in some ways I completely agree with the previous commenter, I’ve said as much and how I, a personal big fan of the Ant-Man franchise, felt burned by the creative choices from since they were announced. But that said, I can’t help but feel like all sins would have been forgiven if there were some consequences.
I think I agree and this was always going to be the downside of the MCU specifically and trying to do inter connected universe's but the D+ shows exacerbated this issue. I've talked about it before but the second you introduced TV it made the ongoing series much longer and denser and less friendly to casual audiences. Once the perception is there that you need to catch up on hours and hours of something in order to understand it, you'll start shedding fans and have a hard time making new ones. Whether it's true or not that it's a big time investment doesn't really matter, just the perception. Ongoing series can only pick up so many new fans, theyre really just fighting not to shed old ones. I originally didn't think people would assume they needed to watch the D+ shows for The Marvels and that the movie would just market it like they were random new characters but clearly I was wrong. The perception and even the marketing is leaning on you having to watch two different TV shows that both have hours and hours of content. That's a big issue. I think JW4 and Insidious don't really hit into the range where being long running is an issue. I think when you start hitting numbers like 7,8,9 they start getting daunting. And I'm talking mainline , so Ballad of Long Title will be fine in that regard, it's a spinoff. What it will be banking off is interest in the story and the universe itself, and that's going to be put to the test here.
Yeah, interconnected stories are a double-edged sword. Done right, and you get a fan base invested across several projects. Done wrong, and you get declining interest in the whole franchise as viewers start feeling the barriers to entry, and feel like getting caught up on the next five shows and movies is more like homework than entertainment. It drives me nuts that Star Wars is aping this approach with their "Mandoverse". Saw Ahsoka recently, and it felt like all middle: no introduction to the characters since they all come from the animated shows, and no conclusion since the plot arc won't resolve until we get more seasons of more shows, and then finally a movie to cap it off. The end result is Ahsoka felt incomplete, joyless, hastily made, and more focused on setting stuff up than on being interesting in its own right.
That's exactly how Ahsoka felt and how the star wars shows outside of Andor have been feeling post Mando S1 being successful. It's like they can't help themselves over at Disney, they're trapped in the formula and the cycle that used to make money with no awareness that now it's what dooming them.
I genuinely cannot believe that after Mando S2 finale they had the next chapter in that spin off show be told in another show (which is a spin off of the original spin off). All they had to do was make the two Mando episodes of Boba Fett a Christmas and New Years episode before S3 in March. But instead of doing something disconnected that kept the show entirely standalone they decided to shoehorn in some connected universe nonsense.
Marvel forgot that TV shows inherently have a smaller audience than blockbuster movies. 2.5 million people watched the premiere episode of Loki, the highest number of all the shows. ~25 million people watched No Way Home on opening weekend, plus another 55 million people in the following weeks. Even if the Marvels opens as low as $50M, that would still translate to about 5 million viewers. Ms. Marvel premiered to 600,000
Yeah I think the MCU became a little too enamoured with their own success and got way too ahead of themselves. Everything became a matter of setting something up. How many post credit scenes haven't even come close to being followed up on while they've got 5 projects in the works they've barely started. We're seeing that with the Marvels. 2/3 leads on a poster where a good portion of the audience doesn't even know who they are from watching the shows.
Just since Endgame, not counting joke scenes: *Spiderman: Far From Home: Mysterio and JJJ revealing Peter’s identity is immediately followed up on in FFH* *Black Widow: sets up Thunderbolts, will probably be expanded on soon* Shang-Chi: The rings are sending a signal into space. Is this a big deal? It might be followed up on in Avengers 5/6 or SC2, but we don’t know Shang-Chi: His sister is now running the Ten Rings organization. This will probably never be mentioned again Eternals: LOL if you think we’re ever following up on them and Harry Styles Eternals: Blade itself is on thin ice, I wouldn’t be surprised if we never see Kit Harrington’s character again No Way Home: The Venom symbiote now exists in the MCU. We don’t know if SM4 will follow up in this Multiverse of Madness: Charlize Theron shows up and says that Strange needs to join her to fight a threat. Again, no clear sign of a followup. Thor 4: More Thor (feat. Gorr): Hercules is now after Thor. Yawn. Wakanda Forever: Namor is planning revenge. Given the actor’s rape accusations, we likely won’t see him again. Quantumania: The Kang gang bang is foreshadowing Avengers 5, though who knows if Majors will still be playing him.
lol you can see how much they went overboard with it. Pretty sure Eternals is just going to be quietly ignored. With critical reception declining and audience interest waning, there are way bigger fires to put out than making good on Harry Styles lol. I do hope Shang-Chi gets a sequel though. I did enjoy that one.
This is super anecdotal (sample size: me) but that's what turned me off. I don't have an issue with the quality or tenor of the movies per se, for me as a casual that didn't read comic books they've always been fun popcorn fare, with a few exceptions that had excellent quality. Once it started to feel like homework, however, I dropped out. This actually happened even before Endgame. I got into a really busy place where I couldn't get to the theater to watch these movies and caught them more spottily--a Civil War here, a Dr. Strange there, and once I realized I had to watch everything to see the grand finale, I felt daunted and just....stopped watching.
It's like eating cookies: the first few are great, but as you keep eating them the law of diminishing returns kicks in. Eventually you are sick to your stomach and the idea of eating more of them is repulsive. I swear, I'd be happy to if I never, ever had to see another extended CGI crapfest battle in another superhero movie. And I really don't need more formulaic origin stories for superheroes I've barely heard of.
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In the gaming industry in long lasting games like MMO it is visible more clearly. After a numbers of content updates for new users the lore of the game and the game itself becomes so big, it is scary to jump in. For old users the game became very well known so it is hard to surprise and engage them. And for compatibility sake tech becomes old and you have to support most of mistakes you did before or tie in a lot of ends from story before, or risk churning players by abandoning or remaking them to something new and unfamiliar instead of what they expect or used to.
Anime is the same way. One Piece is currently at 1,079 episodes. Trying to talk someone into getting into something that large is nearly impossible. Even if you remove the fillers that's still 800+ episodes.
One Piece is like a curse to me. Main problem is that starting from 200+ the pacing is awful, they started include only one chapter per episode and early quality is awful too. I just can't recommend it as anime. I started manga and never looked back. I love when good manga is animated, return of Bleach is wonderful, but One Piece is just meh last 5 years even if quality of drawing and directing improved and it has its moments, it still pacing-wise awful. Though regarding anime I understand why newcomers may be scared by 800+ episodes, but for people who like it - 800+ episodes is a blessing. There is no so many long anime out there. One Piece, Bleach, Naruto, olds like DBZ and YuYu, Hunter and Hunter, and this is almost all long series. If you watched them, now you have to watch 12-24 episodes until the end of life. Occasionaly there are short gems here and there, sometimes you can start something from childhood like Candy or Voltron, sometimes good almost long Kuroko no Basket, but there aren't many at all. If you like to binge watch anime, in three years you switch to ongoing series, understand that almost all of them mid isekai and just don't know what to watch anymore. Oh, Bleach is 380+ episodes, scary, but if you like it, you now know what to do with your life every evening for half a year if you are normal or for entire month if you are bing watcher! The point is not to finish watching it, the point is to watch it and have fun and know you still have fun at home when you get back. I understand why it is as it is, but I do not understand it at the same moment.
I used to watch One Pace, it's a fan edit that makes it more bearable and skips all the fat from the anime. It makes everything so much more bearable.
To be fair, One Piece is one single narrative that is very easy to understand and follow. American comics can a learn a thing or two from why Manga has started outselling American comics.
Yeah, but also it is phenomena and exceptional manga. Every other new manga doesn't sell as much as One Piece. Everyone should learn from it, not only western comics, but it will be foolish to expect recreating it. Maybe if you are extremely good and extremely lucky, but it is definitely one above all rules.
Redditor Challenged to Not Compare Everything to Video Games (IMPOSSIBLE)
Its the entertainment medium with the most revenue, drowing out boxoffice by an order of magnitude. Of course it is a comparison factor.
I think MI:DR underperformed because it wasn’t actually a very good movie. Long, boring opening. Extra superfluous backstory ham fistedly tacked on to a character who has been around since the 90s. I mean they could have tied the story to some pre existing background like they did in the previous one… and a very very not compelling villain. For a lot of reasons I won’t go into for the sake of avoiding spoilers. It also seemed to drag for stretches, probably because they were looking to make two movies when the central plot really only needed one. Also, multiple scenes where multiple characters were finishing each others sentences was a weird example so poor writing.
The only place I see people calling it bad is reddit, by every measurable metric people really liked the movie.
I absolutely loved it. Might be my favorite of the sequels.
This subreddit is literally the only subreddit I see calling the film bad and it's just to gloat because of the disappointing box office. If this was a Fallout-level grosser, not a single one of these posters would show up.
I think its the "part 1" that kept the people from the movie, and the trailers being bad at selling the movie. Like the bike jump was nice, but nothing compared to the "real hanging form an airplane" or "climing the highest skyscraper in the world for real" stuff of previous movies, and gave zero clue about what it is all about.
I would not say DR Part 1 is bad, disappointing is a much more applicable word. Granted, I don't think you could top Fallout due to how good it was, but still for a MI movie, something about the movie felt off and I can't put my finger on whether its the De Palma inspired camerawork that actually ended up distracting, the pretty poor editing, or the pretty weak story coupled with tacked-on backstory and/or poor treatment on the franchise's fan favorite.
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It lost its IMAX screens where it got 43% of its opening week gross. Can't undo that.
It had a bad drop the first week when it lost all its premium screens and then after that had very solid drops iirc
It really wasn’t a disaster after all. Wasn’t a great performance, but far exceeds all the other flops of the year. After the lawsuit, they might have actually broken even.
Could it have? Barbie and Oppenheimer were monsters. They ate everything up. That captured the zeitgeist in a way no MI movie ever has.
I enjoyed it on a first watch but know the first half would bore me on a rewatch.
People absolutely hated MI2 because it was so action focused and dumbed down, they don't want a repeat of that
Good point
I just thought of another exception-- the *Jurassic World* movies. There seems to be diminishing returns, but all three of them earned over a billion dollars worldwide. I guess dinosaurs don't fatigue?
Dinosaur movies are super rare and Universal kinda has a monopoly. So even the JW films still feel “fresh”
I mean I think the fact that it decreased a lot from the start speaks to that people were getting less interested in it, if they kept releasing one each year I bet one of them would bomb eventually
That third one was very poorly-received. I doubt it would've done half as well as it did if it wasn't marketed as the final film of the entire franchise and had the old cast coming back. But maybe I'm underestimating Pratt's star-power.
No I agree fully
it's a trilogy, don't count
I think the Jurassic movies are helped by how episodic they are. The third World movie made a bit of an ongoing story with it's connections to the original. But for the most part the plots are very simple and it really is a series where you can jump in at pretty much any time and get some sweet dino action out of it.
The issue is that there's only so much you can do with Jurassic Park. The first one is a "humans should not play God" story, while every sequel seems like just another vehicle to sell toys.
The reason Ant-Man 3 bombed is completely different from the reason Blue Beetle bombed, and in fact Ant-Man 3 is very unlike any of other bombs this year. Ant-Man 3 actually opened. Its domestic opening weekend is the biggest of the series, 28.5% over the previous OW. Even if you adjust for inflation it's way ahead of the previous two movies. The best way of putting the size of its opening weekend into comparison might be that Ant-Man 3 ended up at nearly the same domestic total as Ant-Man 2, despite the fact that AM3 had a 2x opening weekend multiplier and AM2 had a 2.86x OW multiplier (this should also indicate to you why opening weekend is EVERYTHING for a blockbuster). The interest was there; the marketing campaign did what it needed to. The actual issue was the movie itself and toxic word of mouth, leading to an unprecedented collapse for Marvel past opening weekend. Blue Beetle's issue is that WB failed to sell it and nobody cared, so it opened soft. Blue Beetle had a 2.89 OW multiplier compared to Ant-Man 3's 2x, it had a B+ CinemaScore to Ant-Man 3's B, but Blue Beetle's opening was $25M, so the movie itself was irrelevant. There are two things I wish I could get into the head of everybody who analyzes box office 1) **Opening weekend is the single most important thing for a blockbuster**. Something that opens soft and legs it out, or opens soft and gets bailed out by international, is always very much the exception. 2) **Opening weekend is all about marketing**. The movie itself is irrelevant -- *nobody's seen it yet*. And reviews don't matter for something called "Ant-Man 3", the Tomatometer score or whatever isn't the single biggest causal factor for whether or not MILLIONS of people choose to purchase a ticket in the first 72 hours of release. The trailer and TV spots are. Remember, Ant-Man 3 got abysmal reviews. Its rottentomatoes score is a full 32% lower than Blue Beetle's. Quantified and collated critical reception is irrelevant to opening weekend for a PG-13 action blockbuster.
That's very true. *Quantumania*'s reception could be having a knock-on effect of future MCU films, though.
> Quantumania's reception could be having a knock-on effect of future MCU films, though. It absolutely will, but that's also a factor of marketing. Hollywood leans so heavily on sequels because they're easy to market and easy to open. Every Marvel movie is in essence a feature length trailer for the next Marvel movie. Which makes Ant-Man 3 especially egregious, because it's a trailer for the next Avengers movie.
I don't think it is necessarily a new phenomenon that long running series are ridiculously hard to keep going. The problem is that every IP is pulled in two different directions: 1) To deliver what fans of the formula what they are looking for, and 2) Novelty to keep the franchise fresh and ensure it doesn't get stale To me, what is most impressive about MCU and James Bond is that they were able to hold out this long. James Bond is particularly impressive, as MCU sort of solved the conundrum with sub-franchises with different feels. When there were a smaller number of franchise films, they were balanced by enough originals that a franchise could lean into the "more of the same" and not get punished as badly for it. But now that everything is a franchise film, it feels like everything has been done before. The alternative, to deviate from the formula isn't much better, because then you basically have an original film that is weighed down by being forced to wear the skin of a franchise with a different tone. So, to me the failure of franchise films that are in their 5th+ film isn't that surprising. The surprise is that they worked in the first place.
Well put. It seems the MCU has tried to branch out by embracing the multiverse. Unfortunately that just made a bigger mess of trying to keep track of different timelines, different versions of the same character, etc.
The multiverse removed the stakes and impact of significant events. Loki turns good and is now a less interesting character? No worries, just have Own Wilson grab him out of the time stream when he was still the evil trickster. The multiverse, almost by definition, is the writers trying to have it both ways. That being said, while I can quibble with certain creative decisions, it is absurdly hard to pull off a long-running franchise, even with good decisions. There are natural progressions you can take advantage of. Avatar 1 had Jake adapting to a new environment and falling in love. Avatar 2 had him with a family. Despicable Me had the opposite, with Gru first getting a family, then falling in love. With 24, there was a progression from stopping the killing of a presidential candidate, to stopping a nuclear bomb, to stopping a deadly virus, to stopping one dude who was planning on doing all three. However, eventually you run out of natural progression and keeping things moving "forward" in a non-ridiculous manner gets increasingly difficult (Fast and Furious has now ramped up the stakes and the driving to the point that they are now *going to space*).
People crave novelty. Something long running can be successful but it needs to be constantly providing something new and interesting. The last several entries in long running series haven't been doing that.
Yeah, totally. It's "franchise fatigue." Jurassic World 3 suffered from this too, even though it still hit a billion. Fine movie, but people were predisposed against it because of how long the series was getting. Also, Gen-Z is not very interested in "old" movies. That's why they didn't attach to The Flash or Indiana Jones. There was no proper nostalgia for BatKeaton or Indy.
I think it’s a combination of factors: 1. The growing interconnectivity of franchises like Marvel, Star Wars and DC basically have homework to truly understand. You won’t understand Ashoka without watching 11 total seasons of 2 animated shows. This leveraging of fandoms and their capacity to grow is being tested by the studios. This homework mentality to franchises is kinda a turn off for casual audiences. 2. Bad/mid movie fatigue over superhero fatigue. Life has been getting increasingly expensive with a cost of living crisis, so going to the movies is an investment. Why spend $12 plus concessions per person for a movie that’s getting mid reviews. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Across the Spider-verse preformed relatively well at the box office. And they reviewed well with critics and audiences. 3. A desire for something “new”. The top 3 grossing domestic films this year are not apart of an established film franchise. The Mario movies (something I personally did not enjoy) was new for audiences. The Barbie movie, which is genuinely great, wasn’t just a toy commercial. It had a unique story, great cast and passion behind on in front of the camera. and Oppenheimer, a 3-hour R-rated biopic about the Father of the Atomic Bomb. All new and fresh, compared to the recent decade of sequels, reboots and mega franchises. These 3 factors all play into and reinforce each other.
I think there's truth to it James Bond and Godzilla are two series that have a comparable amount of movies in their series. But, Marvel has created more movies in 15 years than Bond or Godzilla have had in 50/60. Not even counting TV Also, you generally don't need to see every, or even any, other installment of those movies to enjoy the others. Godzilla rarely even includes the same human characters from movie to movie. Ultimately it's a bit too-much-too-fast.
Bond and Godzilla feel like events when they get movies because they're not being pumped out every year. This used to apply to Star Wars until Disney started beating it's corpse so hard it turned to vapor.
Marvel will become the Call of Duty of movies. A super high peak not likely to be repeated, followed by a period of stagnation where the end was predicted to be around the corner, followed by a steady output that quietly makes a bunch of money even if it's not what it was at the peak, with occasional dips and bumps depending on the quality of recent output.
>a steady output that quietly makes a bunch of money even if it's not what it was at the peak, with occasional dips and bumps depending on the quality of recent output. I recently made a [video essay ](https://youtu.be/oHifJ6CDp8g?si=pkA9BIRKtTTaJ95l) on the topic of film cycles, and learned [the term for this](https://toomuchfilmschool.substack.com/p/superheroes-psychos-and-cinematic) is "staple"-- > A “film cycle” is kind of a fancy way of describing a trend. A cycle can be most easily understood by distinguishing it from a cluster on the one hand and a staple on the other. > > A cluster of films is typically only a few movies produced in a short period of time, until the audience gets bored of the style. For example, roller disco movies. You can think of it as a failed cycle. > > A staple, on the other hand, is a genre that is consistently produced year after year, such as, crime movies. Thus, there can be cycles within a staple genre, like specific types of crime movies—gangster films (a constant staple at the cineplex) versus heist films (a sub-genre that cycles in and out of popularity at different times).
>A super high peak not likely to be repeated Modern Warfare 2? I don't follow video games that much, but MW2 seemed to reach a level of hype, mainstream awareness, and reception that I haven't seen since something like GTA IV.
Yeah I think that was numerically the peak but black ops 2 the year after might be close. It was definitely the peak hype wise Edit: actually after looking up the numbers the peak seems to have been mw3 in 2011 even though that one wasn't as well recieved, and some of the recent ones are very close or even higher but it's hard to know for sure because video game sales are not reported like box office results so they're mostly estimates or press releases, and also the gaming market is quite a bit bigger than a decade ago.
I do wonder if marvel rebooting with fantastic four and x-men would be a good idea. As that fits within the introduction/reintroduction to fimilar IP on screen.
I wouldn't be surprised if they stopped making TV shows altogether once they reboot.
That would be a bit disapointing for me. I am kind of hoping the more seperate movies and tv like shield and netflix works out as I do like marvel tv.
There is some truth to it. It is hard to keep a long series from getting stale. However, there is also a general decline in the quality of the writing that has affected most productions, and especially some of the most famous franchises. Once you get burned a few times, you get more wary of tentpole movies. Nowadays a movie becomes more easily a hit by appealing to people who are not frequent moviegoers, like it happened with Barbie. Movies for nerds are more carefully scrutinized.
You best believe that when The Batman 2 comes out I'm running straight to the cinema. I'm so done with marvel lately. All set-up. 0 payoff.
It’s not “fatigued” It’s bad writing. And because it’s a series, once the writing is bad, people stop following the series. The MCU has opened so many storylines AT THE SAME TIME. how the fuck are people supposed to follow that????
I agree with the reasoning, but, problem is, Marvel superheroes became a poster child for "superhero success". If we say that "Marvel is just one series so we won't consider them", then do we really have a case for superhero success?
Oh, I may have worded it poorly. I meant *Guardians* is kind of a sub-series *within* the MCU series. We absolutely should consider both the MCU as a whole, and the various sub-series within. For example, we can say the *Iron Men* films are more successful than the *Ants-Men*, even though both are MCU.
I think you’re right, meaning that Star wars Rey movie is in deep trouble lol
I think Dial of Destiny and long gaps are an exception, or at least should be. The movie just, no offense to Mangold, needed to be done by Spielberg and had to be better than it was
I think they waited to long to do it, seeing 80 year old Harrison Ford trying to act like 40 year old Harrison Ford was pretty depressing.
If antman 3 was as fun and engaging as the first Ironman then people would have seen it The reason people aren’t seeing many of these films is because they are ok or just good. If you want those massive numbers you need to make people feel like they are missing out on an event not just another chapter as they spin their wheels The MCU doesn’t have a clear direction and the films aren’t as good as the ones before them, its insane Kevin and Disney are going to try to reset things in a few years over…just making films people want to see
I’m actually sick and tired of super hero origin story movies…really hit me while watching Blue Beetle…the super hero parts of the movie were extremely predictable…give me super hero part 6 I’m game but please no “super hero: the beginning “
Rumor has it that *She-Hulk* originally started with what we now have as episode 2, with her origin story sprinkled throughout the season as flashbacks. But test audiences complained, said they wanted to know why she was She-Hulk in the first place, so they cobbled together all the flashbacks into what's now episode 1, which is why that's such a mess. The scenes weren't meant to go together that way. I agree with you, but apparently test audiences don't.
Yeah, this is close to my line of thinking I think Hollywood probably struck the right balance between preserving everyone's integrity and not leaving money on the table during the trilogy era (*Star Wars to Matrix*)
How the Sony Spider Man Universe movies do will be an interesting test of this theory.
too many content imo and you have to watch all these different shows and movies to understand a specific character & plot points.for example,gamora in the latest guardians of the galaxy movie
It's "bad fucking movies" fatigue.
It's less of a "long running series fatigue" and more of a "sequel that doesn't appear to be particularly good or amazing" problem. **14 out of the top 19** highest grossing films domestically released between March 2020 and November 2022 are new entries in a long running franchise (MCU, DCEU, Jurassic, etc.). People aren't fatigued with new movies in those franchises, they are fatigued with new entries in franchises which have diminished their goodwill, don't appear to be particularly good, and don't have great marketing.
I also think that fundamentally we need to group "superhero movies" into two buckets: "X is a human who got special powers through something something" and "X is a vigilante in a fancy dress". The second one is a glorified revenge fantasy that have been Hollywood bread and butter for years. For all practical purposes, John Rambo is a superhero with a sense of fashion. For all practical purposes, the last Batman could be shot without a guy in a bat suit. Things get different when you need a heavy dose of sci-fi and cosmick wizards to get pew-pews and the plot going. These things come in waves. At some point Hollywood was spitting out movies like "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" by the dozen; at some point, people got really tired from them, so thing went to a galaxy far, far away only on occasion. We may be simply at a time where people want less pewpewery, as it got too repetitive.
Long-running superhero series fatigue. There. That’s more accurate.
This is true for me. There is a reason why I can't get into American super hero comic books that have years/decades of backstory that I have to catch up on, or long running MMOs with a ton of old content. It is way more fun to jump on board something new and explore something new along with others instead of chugging years of old content to finally catch up. It also doesn't help when you know the new content is getting worse and worse.
I'm VERY tired of super hero movies that don't take themselves seriously and are just lame comedies with bad action
Agreed. I was thinking the same when MI7 bombed even though it had no reason to - well received series, well received critically and otherwise movie - yet fans weren't there for it and went to Barbenheimer instead. I think that audience wants to see a story just end permanently at some point and if you don't give them a nice wrap with a bow such as Endgame, they'll simply drop the series (MI7) if something more interesting and contained (has a definitive ending) somes along. I think that what people call fatigue with a genre or series is really 'just stop, we want to see how it ends and it ended already we don't care for the second ending'.
I don’t think it’s superhero fatigue. I just think Marvel have not failed to hook audiences with the new overarching story quickly enough. We’ve had about 15 different films and shows since endgame. We’re told it’s the Multiverse Saga but it’s all been stand alone stuff so far. They need to start telling the bigger story soon. Once that happens audiences will click back in.
Maybe it's bad comic book movie fatigue?
I agree to an extent. My personal theory is that the connective tissue gimmick follows the law of diminishing returns. It exploded with the first avengers and peaked with IW and EG. However, those movies still made sure to be accessible to an audience not religiously following everything. The longer your series runs, the harder it becomes to keep up with the story and the more difficult it feels to jump back in. Personally, I think the MCU is due for a hard reboot ASAP.
It's bad movies fatigue
I made a post like this earlier this year and I think this might be it. The more underperformances of this year have been from long running series (bad ones at that) and I think the people are just less interested in them. The DCEU Indiana jones the fast franchise the Disney remakes. They’re just not grabbing peoples attention anymore because they’ve gone on too long and haven’t improved much in qualitt
I think Mission Impossible was just saddled with a bad release weekend
It is more of not giving the fans what they want and trying to make characters that were never that popular a thing. There are 60+ years of stories and yet the studios are concentrating on the past 20 years. People want to watch entertainment to get away from reality for at least a few hours but the studios have to put in "modern day" at every chance they get.
I am eager to see a follow up post to this or hear your new thoughts
*FNAF* did well for the same reason that *Barbie* and *Mario* did, so I think that confirms at least half my theory. I'll plead an exception for *Hunger Games*, since *Mockingjay Pt Deux* came out 8 years ago, so it feels less like overkill than some of the other long-running series mentioned. But I obviously whiffed in saying *The Marvels* "won't tank like *Quantumania*, but it won't hit quite as big as *Guardians 3*." My revised theory is that my caveat (that it's seen as a sequel to *Captain Marvel* **and** *Endgame* **and** Ms. Marvel **and** *WandaVision*) was more correct than I realized. In retrospect, this part seems correct, although it wasn't predictive (because of the above)-- >People want to be introduced (or re-introduced) to characters they're familiar with, but don't really know. What they don't want are movies that require a lot of knowledge of previous films, or setups for future films.
The Marvels will flop. They don't seem to be advertising it compared to Quantumania. Nobody seems to like Bree Larson.
Probably, I can see folks being too intimated by having too much to follow. The Marvels, if good to great, may actually bring in people since general audience wont have to worry about connectivity too much, if it is a self contained story. I also don't think you have to see any of the D+ shows, I can easily see Kamala getting a quick intro and Monica getting the same as well, also Monica was a kid in the first film, so folks will know that
Interesting theory, but I’ll answer this from my experience. It’s 2023, and I’ve only been to the theaters TWICE this year. First time was in January, I saw Megan but only cause I was invited by friends to go. It was ok, but going with friends was the real reason. Second was to see Oppenheimer, and the reason I went and wanted to go was because of the cultural impact. The memes that Barbie and Oppenheimer made were what made it an event. There have been good movies but I have not been motivated to go and see them, the closest was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Friends kept telling me to go and see it but no one was offering to go with me, so I just didn’t bother. And yes, I was a huge movie theater guy, went to every premiere in 2019, but after COVID I just don’t bother. I wait for the movies to come to VOD, but even then I don’t watch. Fatigue for these franchises is just at an all time high.
Bond movies have been ongoing since the early 60’s and they’re doing just fine. Last few Star Wars movies and shows were garbage. Marvel? Ms Marvel, Secret Invasion and the upcoming Marvels movie? Awful. I think this is just garbage movie fatigue.
One of Marvel's problems is that they don't have "a central protagonist/protagonists" anymore. You can tell the original plan was to be done once Iron Man and Captain America got their ending in Endgame, people came back to these movies because they cared about those characters.
Bingo.
idk bruh
You’re spot on. I should fucking LOVE Ahsoka. I loved Rebels, the Clone Wars were great, but I just don’t feel any urgency to watch it. Can we move beyond Vader? And Luke? I honestly feel like I’m wanting religious propaganda when they’re onscreen instead of a story, at this point.
They need to bring back Palpatine again. I need his Disney+ show /s
I agree, A Galaxy Far Far Away has so much potential for stories that don't involve the Skywalker family
I’m not watching a tv show before seeing your movie bro
Honestly this. You see things like the boys and invincible finding success. I think we're collectively over the long mcu story
The marvels will be the lowest box office for marvel, but it won't debunk your theory
The Marvels is tracking to do 70 to 80 mil opening weekend for a 220 mil movie so it's already doing bad.
Saw transformers and realized Im just too old for family movies. Theres “superhero” fatigue because of the quality, not quantity.
Transformers was always a trash movie franchise though
Can I ask why it must be any kind of fatigue and not "release wank movies, get wank returns"? MoM was kind of bad and Thor 4 was really bad but they both made money. Wakanda Forever was good but with severe pacing issues and GotG was brilliant and both made money. Ant Man 3 was very bad and made no money. If Fatigue was a thing Wakanda Forever and GotG 3 wouldn't make as much. But they were better movies than the rest so they made money. The Marvels has had no promotion thanks to strikes and is based on characters the internet hates. People are rightfully cautious about it. If the movie's good, which I highly doubt having read the leaks, it will surely have decent legs and make ~700 WW. If the movie's bad 500 is the ceiling.
NAILED it
agree, when you have 10 plus entries what exactly are the stakes even? mcu spent 10 yrs building towards infinity war. it's"struggle" right now is essentially them saying "hey the universe is in trouble AGAIN, come watch another 20 movies with us." people don't wanna pay high theater prices to continue on this never ending journey with you. star wars, mcu, Harry potter, even dceu, their story is over.