So, let’s get into it: what happened with Marvel?
Let’s start with some obligatory table-setting: following Phase Three (and, specifically, Avengers: Endgame) would have been a monumental creative challenge for any studio, product line, or storyteller; take your pick for which one you consider Marvel Studios to be. One proposal which makes absolute sense in a universe where we aren’t being crushed under capitalism’s lunatic demand for year-on-year-growth is the one that suggests that the MCU should simply have taken four or five years off, building back some anticipation and demand, and getting narrative ducks squarely in a row. A capitalism-friendly alternative, though, worth thinking about: they could have made Phase Four television only, and pushed Marvel Studios’ entire creative might behind establishing a beachhead on Disney+. This is nearly what they did anyway, thanks to the pandemic logjam; Phase Four began with three successive Disney+ shows that quickly established a narrative brief around fleshing out secondary characters and playing out some adroit stylistic risks. Two of those — WandaVision and Loki — were excellent, creatively exciting, and bought up a huge amount of audience interest. Loki, for my money, remains the Top Five Marvel.
But then they just. Kept. Coming.
Hey, What If?, Hawkeye, Moon Knight (particularly Moon Knight) and Ms. Marvel were all solid work. The trouble with piling them one on top of another, though, is that the process by which we all became overwhelmingly familiar with the contours and limitations of a standard MCU television project, happened very rapidly — and in tandem with some legitimate content burnout. In 2021, there was a new Marvel “thing,” on television or at the movies, every week for 40 out of the year’s 52 weeks. By the time She-Hulk aired in the summer of 2022 — arguably the first series since WandaVision to substantially play with the Marvel narrative style, though (again) Loki and Moon Knight came close — I, for one, was exhausted and over it. She-Hulk, by the way, turned to be another of the better things Marvel has done. (Even making it into the top 15 is an achievement, when the list is 43 rungs and counting.) But when your better work is slipping under the waves out of sheer content density, something’s wrong.
Side note: Marvel has evidently identified this problem, and pulled back considerably on their Disney+ pace. Whether this has anything to do with, y’know, the other thing, is not a secret anyone is telling.
More table-setting: for about ten full years, Marvel Studios had an absolute lock on its quality control. Not every movie was great and not every movie was a hit, but they all fit for the most part within the Marvel house style — which I identify less with some conspiracy-theorist fealty to the Department of Defence (thank you Film Twitter) than a simpler, more elegant rubric: they cast extremely charming actors to play their characters, and then make movies that cannily sell the audience on how entertaining those characters and their adventures can be.
Not simple, not easy, and needing to seem simultaneously effortless while, I would assume, requiring a lot of fine-tuning behind the scenes. And Marvel Studios had it on an absolute lock for Phases One, Two, and Three.
In Phase Four, Eternals happened.
Broadly, I have a lot more time for Eternals than most people — I really like that movie, and I think it’s the most interesting film the studio’s made since the Ragnarok / Black Panther combo in 2017/18 — but even I won’t stand up to defend whatever is going on with Gemma Chan’s portrayal of Sersi, a character wholly reinvented for the screen but one who has not been given, functionally, any new hook or charisma upon which to hold the middle of her own story. Eternals gets by (for me, particularly!) because it’s a 10-person principal cast and at least half of them obey the dictates of the Marvel house style; I’d follow Druig, Phastos, Makkari, Sprite, Gilgamesh or Kingo into any upcoming Marvel project the studio chooses to plant them in. But Eternals is also emblematic of the cracks beginning to show in the Marvel quality control, because the same mistakes started happening over and over again: characters who need to pop, don’t; and drag their films down (to greater and lesser degrees) as a result.
America Chavez, played by the delightful Xochitl Gomez, never makes a case for herself as a character in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Ditto for Marvel’s other two teen girls in the feature films last year, Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams in Wakanda Forever and Kathryn Newton as Cassie Lang in Quantumania. Black Widow nails the casting of Natasha’s extended family but borks the villain; Thor: Love & Thunder sets up Natalie Portman to fail by letting her lift the hammer but never letting her tell the audience what becoming a superhero feels like. The villain crew in Ms. Marvel is so poorly executed that their three episodes capsize what was otherwise (i.e., for the other three episodes) a Spider-Man: Homecoming-level charm offensive, setting up Iman Vellani’s superb Kamala Khan for what deserves to be a major piece of the MCU.
It’s not that Marvel couldn’t manage new breakout characters anymore (they clearly could: Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop, Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Barry Keoghan’s Druig and his semi-serious flirtation with Lauren Ridloff’s Makkari, Oscar Isaac’s superb dual role as Steven Grant and Marc Spector, Sofia Di Martino’s Sylvie, Tatiana Maslany’s outstanding take on She-Hulk; and once again, Iman Vellani — shit, that’s a whole-ass Avengers lineup, right there!). It’s that the QC slipped enough that Marvel was only managing it half the time. How does something like that happen?
Is it volume? Too many projects, with not enough experienced eyes on critical decisions? Here’s something that certainly was: at this point, I think we can say pretty definitively that Marvel broke the visual effects industry.
It’s important to note that Marvel’s VFX meltdown is not just the result of too many projects, although it is likely also that; the past year’s insider reporting on how things are going so wrong also makes clear that decisions in the effects pipeline — not just particulars, but whole premises for sequences and scenes — were in a persistent state of lock/unlock, under directors who weren’t able to work rigorously to make choices that stick, for work that can therefore be delivered in a timely, responsible manner. This, too, seems like an outcome of spreading oneself too thin. The reason, say, a Kenneth Branagh could direct Thor was that his relative inexperience with effects pictures could be managed by a supportive production team. If your entire director roster is relatively inexperienced in VFX, however — and worse, if some of them are convinced that ILM’s fucking video wall is a good idea — and you’re also delivering 18-30 hours of effects-heavy television projects per year, at the same time? There may be an absolute shitload of low-to-mid-range VFX houses bidding bottom dollar to do your effects work, but that certainly doesn’t mean the work is going to be good. And certainly negates any likelihood that the working conditions will be equitable, fair, or well-paid.
Side note: yes, Victoria Alonso was fired in the past six months, at the tail end of Phase Four. The official reasons have something to do with an independent film she was involved with. Given her position as the head of visual effects and post-production, I wonder.
Another side note: unionize, VFX artists. Unionize.
One final thing I’ve noticed: the real downturn in Marvel Studios’ creative output hits in 2022. I love Love & Thunder cuz Thor’s my boy (and my girl), but as I’ve said elsewhere, anyone who feels… not… that, is well within their rights. (“Too silly!” sez Hemsworth.) The rest of last year’s feature slate sucked, all the way through Quantumania; and I wouldn’t be even marginally surprised if part of the reason The Marvels has been pushed from this month to the end of the year was to allow for some emergency triage. Given that a Marvel movie takes around 18 months to make, there’s another obvious external factor at play: Multiverse, Thunder, Wakanda and Quantumania were all conceived and executed during the pandemic. And if you or any of the folks at Marvel Studios are at all like me, that may, quite understandably, point to some lower-than-average decision quality, as well.
It’s amazing how quickly we’ve all pushed the traumas of those several years out of our heads; I’ve just spent the last two months unpacking my own experiences in more detail than the hell-for-leather forward momentum of “post”-pandemic work life ever allowed me to do, and I could only do it by resigning from my job. Who knows what life was like inside Marvel Studios in 2020 and 2021? Or anywhere, really? A machine works until it breaks. For a very long time, Marvel Studios was a machine.