![]() As Variety reports, not only do these dilute the appeal of the big movies, but they’re coming in such quantities that liking Marvel has started to feel like homework. Speaking of which, Marvel’s appeal has also been diluted by the pile of mediocre Disney+ television shows it has been pumping out. This has started to manifest more frequently: Variety reports that the world premiere of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was plagued with unfinished and out-of-focus shots, and Disney+’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law wasn’t completely finished until after it became available to watch. There’s the ongoing loss of VFX quality, with visual effects teams overworked and underpaid and tasked with putting in backbreaking hours to mollify the whims of indecisive creative teams. The film also had a public test screening this summer which had “middling reviews”. ![]() There’s this month’s The Marvels, which is expected to underperform financially, possibly because its director, Nia DaCosta, started work on another film before it was finished. ![]() A longer shot might be to bring in a Kang-adjacent figure to take over, especially since Gugu Mbatha-Raw has been so compelling as a secondary baddie in Loki.īut even if Marvel can find an acceptable solution to this problem, there are dozens more fires to put out. Others are keener for a recasting (something made more difficult by a post-credits scene in the most recent Ant-Man film, in which we saw all the Kang variants and they all looked exactly like Jonathan Majors). Some higher-ups have suggested abandoning Kang altogether, and drafting in Doctor Doom as a replacement. “Marvel is truly fucked with the whole Kang angle,” they announced.Īnd yet Marvel seems desperate for a workaround. To make matters worse, according to one gleeful dealmaker who spoke to Variety, the upcoming finale to the second season of Loki appears to set up a Kang-heavy future so comprehensively that it is impossible to backtrack from. Photograph: Jay Maidmentīut then Majors was arrested on a domestic violence charge, and other alleged victims came forward, and Majors was dropped by his publicists and managers, and those shoulders start to look awfully shaky (the report claims he was originally dropped by CAA for “brutal conduct” toward staff). ![]() “It’s really impressive what Jonathan Majors is able to do and all the different incarnations – variants, if you will – of Kang that we will see him do. “There’s nobody’s shoulders I’d rather be putting the multiverse saga on than his,” Feige said of Majors at the time. The big bad here, threaded through the preceding movies and TV shows as Thanos once was, would be Kang, played by Jonathan Majors. Knowing that the MCU is never more powerful than when it moves towards an inexorable Endgame-stye climax, Kevin Feige announced a fleet of movies that would line up its most ambitious crossover yet – Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars. The biggest crisis that Marvel faces started last July at Comic Con. This last one is what Variety has decided to lead with. Instead it finds itself bogged down by poor quality, indifferent audiences, a rebellious workforce, apathetic stars and – most pressingly of all – an already-announced plan, years in the making, that is likely to be finger-clicked out of existence by a domestic violence trial. It isn’t so much that Marvel faces an uphill battle, because that would imply that only one thing has gone wrong. Which is probably a good thing because, according to the Variety piece, things seem to be falling apart at a berserk pace. However quickly things start to fall apart now, that early flush of success can never be taken away. The fact that Marvel not only managed to pull this off, but to do it with so much panache that other studios tripped over themselves trying to copy the model (remember Universal’s Dark Universe?) is nothing less than astounding. It had already sold the film rights to its biggest characters (Spider-Man, X-Men, The Fantastic Four) to various studios for a quick buck, but nevertheless wanted to knit together an interconnected franchise with the dregs of whatever it had left, including an alcoholic billionaire, a two-dimensional propaganda tool and a man who could become the size of an ant. A decade and a half ago it operated out of a cramped office above a car dealership, and few people took it seriously. Until very recently, the ascent of Marvel had been a thing of relentless propulsion. ![]()
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