I don’t go to the movie theater.
There is nothing inherently wrong with movie theaters (except maybe that the popcorn costs as much as half a week’s paycheck). But as a busy college student, going to see the latest Disney film on $5-movie-night is not something that I’ve baked into my routine.
Maybe that’s because the last time I went to see a movie, it was “Thor: Love and Thunder.”
When we bought the seats for “Thor” on the little screens in the lobby that replaced real people, we misread the diagram of the theater’s seating arrangement. Instead of the back row, we ended up with the first row: the row where your neck hurts from staring up at the screen before the trailers are even over.
We were already off to a bad start.
Train after train proceeded to wreck as the film progressed. The opening scene was so campy and poorly rendered that I couldn’t ascertain what was happening. Every joke was stolen straight from a decade ago and elicited only pity laughs in the theater.
Marvel movies weren’t always this bad, were they?
Disney famously acquired Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion on New Year’s Eve in 2009. A few short years later, thanks to the aid of Disney’s monetary and distribution powerhouses, Marvel released “The Avengers” in 2012 and effectively changed the direction of the film industry.
“Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses,” Ike Perlmutter, CEO of Marvel Studios until 2015, said. “This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.”
The Disney/Marvel merger was inarguably successful for both companies involved. As Marvel Entertainment was still recovering from bankruptcy in the 1990s, you could argue that Disney gave the studio the success for which it was desperate. However, Disney would not have acquired Marvel in the first place if Marvel was not already demonstrating its own success independent of Disney. Certainly, the success of “Iron Man” (2008) must have caught the eye of Disney CEO at the time, Robert Allen Iger. Since the buyout, Marvel has soared in success. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) was the highest-grossing movie franchise worldwide in 2022, generating $26.6 billion.
(By contrast, the second franchise on the list, “Star Wars,” grossed $10.32 billion. It bears mentioning that Disney also acquired “Star Wars” in 2012.)
Marvel seems to have been thriving for years. But today, everyone I know is burnt out on the content.
So what happened?
While Marvel movies were still selling out at box offices and Disney continued to collect intellectual property like baseball cards, the company decided to challenge the longterm success of Netflix with its first streaming service.
The introduction of Disney+ in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic that closed movie theaters worldwide just a few months later gave Disney an overwhelming nummber of opportunities. Those overwhelming opportunities became overwhelming decisions, which became an overwhelming amount of content.
Suddenly, Disney had the chance to branch beyond biyearly movie theater viewings. They introduced straight-to-streaming movies (“The Lady and The Tramp”, 2019), nostalgic trips to hook older viewers (“That’s So Raven,” 2001), and most importantly: TV shows.
Disney began spitting out TV shows that added to the canon of their highest-grossing franchises: Marvel and Star Wars. Notably, “The Mandalorian” (2020) and “WandaVision” (2021) were popular among viewers. But they did not stop there.
At present, Marvel has released eight series on Disney+ since 2021: In 2021, they introduced “WandaVision,” “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “Loki” and “What If…?” In 2022: “Moon Knight,” “Ms. Marvel” and “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”
You would think that eight series in less than 2 years is a lot.
But wait, there’s more!
While Marvel is also working on second and third seasons for some of their existing programs, they recently announced 12 new series. These 12 series are a speck compared to the expansive content Disney as a corporation has projected for the next five years.
When I opened Instagram the day Disney made its announcements, every single story in my feed said the same thing: “it’s too much.” You’re expected to eat the elephant one bite at a time, but the Marvel elephant is so massive that the idea of taking even a single bite is not any less overwhelming.
With the sheer amount of content Disney is spitting out for Marvel alone, it’s no wonder the quality has dropped in films like “Thor: Love and Thunder.”
VFX workers have taken to Reddit and Twitter to voice their complaints against the working conditions as a Marvel employee.
Reddit user samvfx2015 said about the latest “Thor” film, “On Thor they ask for a complete mini-sequence 2 or 3 weeks before deadline.”
Another user, Mickeymoomoo, wrote: “Marvel has seen grown men punch walls and throw monitors from stress. I broke down a couple of times and have seen the strain it can put on marriages. But hey the $$ was fantastic.”
This creates a vicious cycle:
- Marvel churns out more content
- Employees cannot keep up with demand
- Quality of production falls
- Consumers resent the drop in quality
- Marvel notices the resentment and overcompensates
- Marvel, once again, churns out more content
When you consider the amount of Marvel-related material Disney has produced since launching Disney+, combined with the comments from VFX workers and the visible decrease in film quality, it’s not surprising that consumers are getting burned out on Marvel. There are simply too many things, and it overwhelms the user.
But is Marvel an island? Is this overwhelm of content exclusive to this corporation?
Perhaps the influx of Marvel content is representative of the overall industry. You could theorize that the boom of streaming services in the last decade, exacerbated by the pandemic that kept all the moviegoers at home, created a culture of, “let’s release as much content as possible!”
In 2012, Disney released 15 feature films across their studios. In 2021, they released 33, many of which were distributed to Disney+ instead of the traditional theater.
Another major production studio, Universal Studios, released 15 feature films in 2010. In 2019, the number jumped to 21.
It’s undeniable that the big movie studios are producing more films today than they were 10 years ago. In the throes of their growing content, perhaps Marvel is only trying to keep up with the culture.
It seems unlikely that Marvel will let up on their production anytime soon. In the meantime, their fans will consume what they enjoy most, and they should feel free to disregard the rest. Perhaps we should accept that in the age of streaming and massive studio productions, we simply cannot consume everything.
