The X-Axis – w/c 18 August 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #33. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Díaz & Clayton Cowles. Okay, so the idea here is that the Changeling has a split personality, and (at least as Morph) doesn’t realise that he’s pursuing himself around America. That’s kind of the Sentry’s gimmick, but if it’s a way of transitioning Changeling into an Earth-616 Morph – and having access to that character without complicated alternate reality stuff – then I can see the attraction. Audino does a nicely baffled Morph, though it’s a slightly odd call to keep the character mostly off panel this issue and have Sean and Angelo relay to us what he’s like instead. Still, it’s all very readable.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #12. (Annotations here.) Much of this issue is about getting Reggie into the cast as another mutant – and boy, you can’t accuse the book of rushing that storyline after debuting him back in issue #4 – though it looks like he’s being kept on the sidelines until now. The storyline, though, is basically an excuse to send Axo, Melée and Bronze back in time so that they (and present-day Kitty) can meet pre-X-Men teenage Kitty. Presumably this is the pay off for Kitty’s regular laments about how she shouldn’t have been a teenage hero, as well as a way of advancing her relationship with the kids.
It doesn’t quite work. The plot mechanics to justify the trip back are decidedly wonky, but more to the point, it doesn’t really get the feeling of a different time period. I get that the sliding timeline makes these things complicated, but if you’re going to devote a big splash to the kids’ period costumes, and I’m still left none the wiser about what time period the story thinks it’s set in, we’ve got a problem.
WOLVERINE #12. (Annotations here.) Oh dear. This is the final part of the Elizabeth Howlett storyline, and apparently it really is all just Mastermind doing illusions for… no terribly well defined reason. The story kind of gestures at the idea that maybe Mastermind has also been driven mad by this, and really does think he’s offering himself as a parent figure. But that doesn’t get developed, and the general vibe is simply that Wolverine is being screwed with for its own sake. The high concept seems to be that all this matters because it helps Wolverine to realise that he never came to terms with his mother’s rejection, but I’m not exactly convinced that this tells us anything very interesting about the character. I can sort of understand how you could look at Wolverine’s back story and think that there’s never been any sort of follow-up on Origin, but that’s because Origin isn’t very interesting – it didn’t do any real harm to the character, but it doesn’t add anything very resonant either, because things like Weapon X or even Romulus have vastly more impact as an inciting event in his life. But I digress… The real problem with this arc is that it teases a lot of things that are a lot more interesting than the “it was all a dream” resolution that it ends up delivering, and so inevitably it’s an anticlimax.
PSYLOCKE #10. (Annotations here.) Cancelled after two arcs, which is a shame – Psylocke wasn’t perfect, but it certainly did prove that you can build stories around Kwannon as a solo character. This final issue does feel a little rushed, but not excessively so – you can see a couple of plot points being shoved to the margins, but it finds space for what it really needs to do. Had the series continued, the story would presumably have been about Psylocke’s deal with the Lady in White and the possibility of eventually redeeming Mitsuki and having the girls reunited as adults for real. But as a ten issue run, it feels plausibly complete. Given how much there is to fit in, Carratù does a sound job on the art, and it doesn’t feel as cramped as it might have. Creatively, I’d rank Psylocke as one of the successes of the current period, so it’s a shame to be losing it.
Bleeding Cool’s Weekly Bestseller List is out. None of the X-books made the top 9. (Um, isn’t that supposed to be top 10?)
It’s disappointing that Wolverine can’t even make the list. Ahmed’s writing seems to be driving away readers- after the Mastermind storyline, it’s hard to blame anyone for quitting the book.
The Age of Revelation solicitations for the first week of December have been released.
The biggest, um, revelation is that the Binary series will feature Carol Danvers with the power of the Phoenix force.
Apocalypse will be appearing in Laura’s series.
It’s clear that Doug has some sort of Evil Plan that most of the world doesn’t know about.
At this point, it is becoming clear that Brevoort’s era of X-Men is not connecting with people.
@sagatwarrior – I’m wondering if there’s a larger malaise/issue afoot here. The recent Guardians and Iron Man runs were also cancelled after 10 issues; I think Avengers West Coast is also done after issue 10. All of those books have struck me as pretty enjoyable/compelling runs, and I was susprised that they didn’t find a bigger readership. (See also: Avengers Inc.)
tl;dr: are these X-book-specific issues or something more widespread?
…that said, I do virtually all of my Marvel reading on Unlimited, so I’m likely part of the problem here.
My mother always used to tell me “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” so I’ll say one thing for Brevoort: good on him for approving a whopping 5 female-led solo series.
Sure, the results varied wildly. Psylocke was pretty good, Magik is great, Laura Kinney is forgettable, Phoenix is godawful, and Storm is too insane to rate. It’s still good to see.
My guess is that this is a consequence of Marvel’s chronic over-production ; we’re well past the era when the market could sustain four Avengers books at once. Even a B-title like West Coast Avengers struggled. (And I don’t really see the latest iteration of New Avengers doing much better.)
It’s more obvious with the X-books : starting the relaunch off with 15ish books at once (including half a dozen Wolverine books) – instead of “only” six at the start of the Krakoan era – seems to have doomed most of them. The line badly needs pruning to give each book enough space, but this doesn’t seem to be happening.
(Marvel do seem willing to stick with some books somewhat – Orlando’s Scarlet Witch has gotten 29 issues across two volumes and two miniseries, for example – but they’re the exception rather than the rule. At this point the longest book standing is… Ziglar’s Miles Morales ? Or MacKay’s Moon Knight, I guess, if you don’t count the two renumberings.)
I suspect the events are messing up the X-books’ ability to gain traction. It’s hard to get excited about a storyline where Doug takes over the world, while other books are still doing a storyline where Doctor Frigging Doom is doing the same plot.
What Marvel is doing is flooding the market in the hope of snatching up as much comic sales as possible. If they are throwing out so much content, most of it isn’t sticking, but each sale adds to their bottom line, so they can claim over 50% of the market. Even if most of these books aren’t selling enough to warrant continued publication, they are still selling copies. It’s too much for the market to bear, but if they have to cancel DD or 80% of their X-line, it will just lead to a relaunch with a new number one that will pick up some more attention for a limited period.
“From the Ashes” was mainly a failure, in that everything except Uncanny, X-Men, Magik, and Wolverine seem to have fallen into cancellation territory within one year. Marvel’s response is to publish a major event for a few months, then restart the line from #1, I’m sure with another twelve titles. Then, Marvel will get what they san from those books for the next ten issues or a year, and it will be time to figure out what to do next again.
Marvel is more concerned with the quantity than the quality. They could cut way back on their line and concentrate on making their remaining line much stronger, but they’re going to lose market share by pursuing that model, unless they can assured that publishing (say) four high-quality X-titles will attract a huge amount of readership, enough to make up for the loss of publishing eighteen X-titles at once for a few months. There’s nothing that guarantees this would be the case. A lot of the fans buying Uncanny X-Men and X-Men were also buying Psylocke, Phoenix, and Storm (or whatever).
I hope they don’t cancel New Avengers – I’ve been liking it so far. And the premise of “What if the Illuminati were actually deranged instead of just amoral” has been a good hook.
I expect that we’ll see From the Ashes as a transition period from the highs of Krakoa to whatever movie tie-in status quo they give us, hopefully with another hit writer who has a solid vision. Whether we get that right after Revelation or if we spin our wheels here a while longer is a question – MacKay doesn’t seem ready to wrap up yet, but Uncanny doesn’t really seem to have any bigger plots going on besides whatever one panel we get about Gambit every month, and Exceptional could get cancelled whenever and I don’t think anyone would notice.
Well, since there are two years before there will be any new X-Men movies, if you think Marvel is spinning the wheels waiting for a movie, then we’ve got a bit of a wait before they’re going to move on.
The Fantastic Four movie didn’t influence the FF comic in any way either. They relaunched the title from #1 again, but Ryan North’s story just continued uninterrupted (in fact, we’re still stuck with OWUD loose tie-ins, even though I thought North’s new direction was going to be for the purpose of keeping the FF book away from Dr. Doom).
I’m wondering whether the disappointments of the recent MCU films have had an effect on Marvel’s books at all. I’ve always been under the impression that the two weren’t linked at all; the popularity of the films wasn’t reflected in sales of the books. But maybe the drop in the films, for whatever reason, had an effect on the sales of the books? If sales numbers were available, it might be interesting to see if they happened to be correlated.
And, yes, correlation is not causation, and it’s not my intentions to go why people aren’t watching the films (for the record, I stopped after Captain America: Civil War). There are plenty of potential reasons within the books (crossovers, reboots, price, etc.) that could cause the people to drop a title.
Alternatively, the idea of the power fantasy utopia could appeal to a certain audience, and the lack of that after Krakoa could have turned people off most of the X-books. It might also explain the sales success of Storm, which seems to sometime be an “Ororo Monroe Can’t Lose” book. How’s that for a dated 90s reference!
I think the reason for the drop off in popularity for the films is simple. Superhero burnout. You can only keep the general public interested in movies about superheroes for so long before they get sick of it. The MCU has been going for 24 years straight now. Most movie franchises will do three or four films before they have to stop from casual viewer burnout, then they might take a decade break before trying to restart the franchise.
The fans who have been getting tired of MCU movies aren’t the type of fans who are reading comic books though. It would be interesting to see how many diehard comic book fans gave up on superhero movies versus how many are still watching every MCU film.
As for me, I stopped after Iron Man. The only MCU film I’ve seen since then is GotG because someone I knew bought the DVD and gave it to me. Even by the time of IM, I was kind of bored by most of the superhero movies, and my cousin (who got me interested in Iron Man) wanted to go see it, so I went with him. I’m the core audience for these things.
“The MCU has been going for 24 years straight now”
Gonna have to question your math there. Iron Man was the first MCU film and it came out in 2008.
“As for me, I stopped after Iron Man.”
You quit the MCU after the first film? That’s gotta be the record for quickest MCU burnout.
I wouldn’t be necessarily surprised at someone bailing out of comic book films at Iron Man since Wikipedia says there were 17 films based on Marvel characters before Iron Man came out. Excluding Howard the Duck, that’s still 16. On the DC side of things, starting from Superman in 1978, there are 17 films before Iron Man. Maybe throw out Swamp Thing and its sequel to get to 15, but even with all the exclusions, that’s 31 modern superhero films. If someone saw two-thirds of those, I could see being done with superhero films by 2008.
I include all the Marvel movies starting with Spider-Man as MCU films. I doubt the majority of moviegoers who remember the first Spider-Man film or X-Men film have any idea that there is supposed to be a difference, as it’s all of the superhero genre. Although, since it’s been 24 years since Spider-Man, there’s been a lot of room for turnover in moviegoers.
“I include all the Marvel movies starting with Spider-Man as MCU films.”
So, X-Men wasn’t a superhero movie in your eyes?
Wasn’t Spider-Man the first? I went and saw both at the theatre, but remember Spider-Man being first. I also remember Spider-Man being released in 2001. I did mention the first X-Men later in my comment.
X-Men (the first one) was before Spider-Man. Before X-Men was Blade. Going back a little further, the Punisher had been played by Dolph Lungren (though I doubt that film in any way contributed to superhero fatigue). There was also that laughable Captain America film that had Cap in rubber ears, and the Fantastic Four film that never saw release.
I think the modern era of superhero movies began with the one-two punch of X-Men and Spider-Man.
Marvel got a second wind with Iron Man and the introduction of the MCU, when people went “oh — you actually can create a shared universe with this stuff”
There may be a portion of the audience who doesn’t see why the saga didn’t just end after they killed their big villain and main hero in Endgame. It does seem like a natural endpoint, in a film that literally has “end” in its title.
I just don’t believe dissatisfaction or disinterest in recent MCU offerings should be dismissed as “superhero fatigue.” I’m one of the MCU fans who hasn’t been impressed by Marvel Studios in recent years, but that hasn’t at all diminished my enthusiasm for The Boys, or Gen V, or Peacemaker to name a few. I don’t believe I’m alone in that.
Whereas I’ve been delighted with just about every Marvel movie and TV show post-Endgame (okay, with the exception of Eternals, Moon Knight and What If, because really, we must have *some* standards). It’s almost as if the MCU audience is as diverse in its tastes and interests as Marvel Comics’ readership…
Marvel and DC certainly contributed to “superhero fatigue” in the movies market of the last few years, but that is on top of a clear crisis in moviegoing in general.
Legal matters aside, it is not like Marvel and DC are alone in producing Superhero movies either. IPs such as Hancock and Darkman, several Mark Millar adaptations, much of streaming-original content and even the recent Dune movies from Legendary may all contribute to the fatigue sensation to some degree.
I agree — Marvel made it a lot easier to pick and choose MCU projects to engage with when they decided to flood the market with movies and TV shows. A lot like what JD and Chris are saying about their comics production.
And Marvel doesn’t seem to understand what makes the comics or the movies work. Hire someone with a distinctive vision, let them work without interference, and you’ll get a hit. In the movies, it was Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Black Panther.
In the comics right now, it’s Ryan North’s Fantastic Four. Doctor Doom or not, he’s writing a quality book that has both popular appeal and critical approval. And they’re not flooding the comics market with FF material. When they do have a spin-off, like the recent Marvel All-On-One, it’s consistent with the main book (and also a lot of fun).
Why Marvel/Brevoort aren’t doing the same thing with at least one X-book is a mystery. I honestly wonder what Gail Simone would do if she was given carte blanche on Uncanny. I doubt it would be “small-scale Gothic-horror lite” with a bunch of unknown characters.
@Diana – Sure, but there’s been an overall significant dropoff in enthusiasm for MCU content compared to earlier years. Granted, some of that comes from the meathead segment portion of the fanbase who cry “wokeness” every time the lead isn’t a straight, white male. Me, I’m just head-scratching over things like Daredevil: Born Again doing a bottle episode. It’s a limited series. Who puts filler in a limited series?
@Thom – Just hire someone with distinctive vision and you’ll get a hit? Why aren’t you consulting in Hollywood if you know how to guarantee a hit?
Yes, when the MCU started it was something new and fresh. You had fans who had never read comics discovering what it was like to be a shared-universe comic book reader. As time went on, for the casual fan, it’s become, “Another Marvel movie? I’ve seen it all before.” They’ve diluted their brand, and unlike Marvel Comics struggling to hold on to market dominance, the Marvel movies didn’t need to flood the market. If all Marvel films went away for five years, I am positive there would be some return of the enthusiasm for Marvel content. If they keep trying to milk it though, there’s going to be the same dropoff in enthusiasm.
The MCU had a good run. There is no other franchise which has managed to sustain popularity for so many years as Marvel superhero films. There was eventually going to be a point where casual fans moved on from the franchise.
@Moo: Great idea! L.A., here I come!
@Chris V – Where the MCU is concerned, it’s a little more than just the usual “been there, seen it-itis” that’s inevitably going to set in over anything that’s been long-running. The quality of has been rather erratic in recent years. You know what I’m talking about.
Oh, wait. No you don’t, because you haven’t seen anything since Iron Man.
I thought the quality was erratic by the time of Iron Man. I didn’t find IM to be a good movie either.
That’s part of milking a franchise too long though, there’s going to be (at least some) drop in content quality. You can’t put out multiple movies year after year and expect the quality to stay high. FF: Rise of the Silver Surfer had terrible reviews and did very poorly at the box office, but it didn’t kill popularity for more Marvel superhero content. The franchise was fresh enough and there had been enough quality releases to maintain fans feeling positive about the franchise. The more movies put out by a franchise within a timeframe though, the more the quality is going to vary, which hurts the brand.
Now, Thunderbolts received a lot of critical praise, but it completely bombed at the box office. If that movie had come out a decade ago, it would have been a hit. Fans are weary of the MCU though. There has been too much erratic content, too much flooding of the market with Marvel superhero movies, that the casual fans aren’t giving the franchise the benefit of the doubt any longer.
@Chris – FF: Rise of the Surfer was made by Fox, not Marvel Studios.
@Thom – About damned time! Should’ve gone years ago. You could’ve saved WB some money had you advised them to hire someone with a clear, distinctive vision to direct “The Spirit” instead of that Frank Miller fellow.
I know, but Marvel put their logo on the film. The company didn’t try to keep it a secret that FF is a property owned by Marvel Comics. Causal movie goers don’t look at what studio produced a film. “Oh, I see that FOX produced this movie, not Marvel studios, well, that explains a lot.” That’s not a thought that crosses a casual film goers mind. They know it was a Marvel superhero movie.
I’d also point out that the MCU had a run of really bad movies after Endgame. The Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania weren’t well-received.
That said, they do seem to have gotten the message about slowing down their releases. They don’t have another movie on the schedule until Spider-Man: Brand New Day next July. That will leave a gap of just over a year between that and Fantastic Four: First Steps. It’s the same on the TV side. There have been six series on the schedule for 2025, but 2026 just has the second seasons of Daredevil: Born Again and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and only one new series, Vision Quest.
Chris V – Well, admittedly I haven’t seen the paperwork, but I believe giving Marvel credit was likely part of the licensing agreement. I doubt Marvel screened all of the Fox films in advance for the sole purpose of deciding whether or not they wanted to be associated with them on a case-by-case basis.
@Thom H- The problems you seem to have with Gail Simone’s Uncanny- the Outliers, the Gothic-horror elements- seem to have been Gail Simone’s ideas. Gail Simone apparently wanted to do a New Mutants/ Generation X type book set in the South with Gambit and Rogue teaching the new mutants. But the book she actually got was Uncanny X-Men. So Kurt, Jubilee and Logan wound up getting neglected. The attempts to portray Warden Ellis as one of the deadliest villains the X-Men ever faced when she’s basically just a podcaster who slept with a guest who claimed he could read minds and turned out to be more genuine than usual also appear to be Simone’s idea.
The major editorial interference with Simone’s run seems to be the schism between Scott and Rogue and the yanking Xavier out of Uncanny early so that Hickman could inflict further character assassination upon Black Bolt.
The reason why you can’t give a writer in a franchise the same creative freedom you can give a writer on a stand-alone book is because a book in a franchise has to be coordinated with other books in the same franchise. If Ryan North wants to use the Wizard. there’s nothing stopping him. If Gail wants to use Sinister, then she has to check if Exceptional X-Men has any more plans for him.
And letting someone with a distinctive vision work without interference doesn’t always work. Look at much of John Byrne’s work from West Coast Avengers onward.
“I’d also point out that the MCU had a run of really bad movies after Endgame. The Eternals, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania weren’t well-received.”
Yes, thank you. Exactly. That string of mediocrity has done more damage to the Studio than anything else. Streaming services have impacted box office receipts across the board in the film industry, but there was a time where seeing an MCU film in the theater first
was a no-brainer. Even when you knew you could wait for it to stream.
That’s pretty much gone now. There’s been rare exceptions like Deadpool & Wolverine, but otherwise the default position now when it comes to MCU films seems to be “Wait for it to stream”.
@Chris – I’ll just add that I strongly doubt that Fox Marvel films made back in the 2000s have any bearing whatsoever on a casual movie-goer’s decision whether or not to go see a Marvel film today.
It seems highly unlikely that anyone passing on seeing a newly-released Marvel film would be doing so because they still haven’t gotten the bad taste of FF:Rise of the Surfer out of their mouth eighteen years later.
Breevort had something interesting to say about Exceptional X-Men on his blog today:
Okwarajari rom the editor’s chair, when you see a book with a strong hook that isn’t connecting with readers, how do you differentiate between a flawed concept the audience is rejecting versus a “missed potential” situation where the execution (creative voice, plot decisions, pacing, etc.) is the actual issue?
And just how exactly does that diagnosis inform your strategy for a book like say, Exceptional, which CLEARLY has a passionate core audience (both online and those currently buying it) for its themes but faces the challenge of growing that into a commercially successful readership (after looking at its current, not-exactly-the-best sales numbers and position in the overall market)?
TOM: I mostly don’t tend to blame the concept when a particular series fails to connect with an audience, assuming that I was the one who put it out in the first place. In other situations, I may look at some title and diagnose it as having a flawed concept, but that’s regardless of its success or failure in the marketplace. And I think that I measure the success of a title or a concept differently than you might. You seem to be indicating that you feel EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN is a failure of some sort, but I don’t really see it that way. More readers would always be nice, sure, but that isn’t the only metric by which I judge the effectiveness of a given series. But there are any number of ways we might try to positively affect the fortunes of such a title, some of which we’ve implemented already.:
No, my point was that bad movies can damage a brand, but it won’t happen immediately. If you have a total of, say, ten movies and two of them are bad, the fans will still be willing to give the franchise a chance. After time though, if you start piling on more and more movies to the franchise, and the quality starts to dip more, then it does damage the brand name. It goes from, “Sure, not every Marvel movie is great, but they’re still worth seeing.” to “Marvel movies tend to be disappointing. Let’s see something else.” Even if a movie in the franchise does get good reviews, like Thunderbolts, the casual fans are getting sick of the franchise, so they’re not running out to see a new Marvel movie.
The longer the franchise has gone on, the more it’s going to hurt having the erratic quality too. After 24 years of superhero movies, the fans are going to lose interest in the franchise if it’s not putting out mostly quality films versus earlier in the franchise’s history, where a Spider-Man, X-Men, or X-Men 2 can build up a lot of goodwill where a bad movie like FF 2 won’t cause fans to give up on the brand before an Iron Man.
Also bad: recent Sony movies featuring Marvel characters that your average moviegoer might think are MCU movies, most DC movies, most Marvel shows… there’s a confluence of factors contributing to superhero fatigue and box office weakness (including the cost of going to movies, everyone knowing these movies will be on streaming in a few months, and the fact that kids aren’t as into superhero movies as they used to be so they’re not clamoring for parents to take them), but a string of mostly-poor entries in the genre has a lot to do with it.
@Moo: I think Morrison did a better job introducing new elements to X-Men than getting rid of old ones, but they definitely got rid of some old X-Men plots and characters: the Shi’ar empire was ruined, Wolverine got his memory back, Genosha was blown up, Scott & Jean were broken up, Jean was killed… other writers and editors undid a lot of Morrison’s changes, but part of Morrison’s attempt to evolve the franchise included removing some of the concepts.
@Chris V – We already know what’s damaged Marvel Studios brand: Marvel Studios. Those old Fox films have nothing to do with it. If they were that damaging, they would have hurt Marvel back at the phase one stage, and that clearly wasn’t the case, so I don’t even see the point in bringing them up. The steaming pile of shit that was “Batman & Robin” from 1997 didn’t prevent “The Dark Knight” from topping a billion at the box office.
@Mike Loughlin- Agreed, but um… isn’t this the wrong thread?
@Moo: Her web connects us all, which means all the threads run together…
(speaking of bad super-hero movies that bombed. But, yes, the reply to you was intended for the other thread, oops)
@Mike Loughlin- Quite alright. I’m just relieved to know it was just an oops on your part because I was a little worried I might be losing it.
Moo-I was making the point that Marvel superhero films used to be more popular. They could do no harm. A bad movie like FF 2 didn’t hurt Marvel’s popularity back then.
Now, after flooding the market for 24 years and putting out a lot of bad films, the brand is damaged. The good will is gone. Thunderbolts might be a good movie? Nope. Sick of Marvel movies. It bombed.
Batman & Robin did hurt the franchise though. They backed away from making anymore Batman movies for nearly a decade, which is typically how franchises operate. “Hurt the brand? Go away for ten years, then come back strong. It will be forgotten.”
Imagine if Warner, instead of accepting the message, decided to keep trying to push out more and more Batman movies immediately. Even if they had produced a few quality movies after B&R, the fans wouldn’t have responded.
Which is what Marvel needs to do at this point, but won’t. Although, Taibak pointed out they do seem to be starting to listen. Too many bad movies over a 24 year span. The MCU needs to go away for five years, then try again. The enthusiasm would return.
At this point, even good reviews for Thunderbolts still led to it being a total failure. The brand is damaged.
@Michael: I largely agree with what you’re saying, but there are lots of ways you can structure the X-books. Having one flagship book that sets the tone for the rest of the line is something they’ve done before.
And I’m sure Gail Simone wanted to do all of those things you mention, but I’m also sure she was only offered a certain scope: one of a handful of splinter X-Men groups. I’m wondering what she — or any number of writers — would have come up with if they’d been offered the keys to the entire franchise. That could have resulted in an entirely different pitch, even from some of the same creators we’ve got now.
@Michel, @Moo: Yes, creators have to have certain limits, especially if they have huge egos like the two you mentioned.
But I think we can all agree that having a distinctive tone and style set by creatives is better *most of the time* than having bland and boring franchise-serving mush demanded by editorial/executives.
The former has a track record of working better than the latter in a lot of — but not all — cases. There are certainly very stylish failures, but not a lot of middle-of-the-road classics.
Chris V – It’s not “flooding the market for 24 years” that’s the problem, and again, the MCU began with Iron Man, not the arbitrary starting point you selected. Maybe the casual moviegoer isn’t aware of that distinction but you still seem to be under the impression that the FF stinkers from the 2000s can be held partially responsible for the decline of the MCU today. As what, a delayed reaction? Time-released bad films? “You won’t remember how much it sucked until twenty years from now.”
The decline of the MCU today comes down to “What have you done for me lately?” and lately, Marvel hasn’t been delivering the goods that fans and casual movie-goers alike have come to expect of them. On that view, maybe the MCU does need to take a bit of a breather. But I don’t see much in the way of, “I don’t care how good it is. It’s been twenty-four years of this superhero shit, and I’m done.”
I would argue that there is a franchise that has kept up its popularity for longer than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, James Bond films.
I couldn’t help but look for the numbers, and since 1962, there have been 27 James Bond films and 1 65 episode season of the spin off James Bond Jr cartoon. In contrast, since 2008, there have been 37 Marvel Studios films and at least 16 different Marvel shows (some now explicitly cast out of the MCU, like Agents of SHIELD and Inhumans, but I don’t know whether Agent Carter is include, and that number doesn’t include shows originating on Hulu or Netflix). There might be some one shot specials like Werewolf that I didn’t include there. The point is, I think Marvel Studios made the mistake of putting out too much, much like Tom Breevort’s X-men line.
Also, as someone who works with data for a living, it is a professional reflex to caution everyone on mistaking their personal feelings for being representative of the entire population’s. I never took my personal feelings of being fed up with the MCU as being representative. Now, I just get to say that I was ahead of the curve.
Though I did read a recent article with James Gunn saying that his DC films are intended to be more character focused rather than spectacle focused. We’ll see whether that ends up being true, but it would have the benefit of keeping costs down. The China market for films is no more, and I can’t help but think that Marvel Studios has been very slow to adapt to that reality.
As a final point, I wanted to say that Madame Web made me laugh a lot and appreciate it for that. It’s no good, but I haven’t laughed that much at a movie in a long time.
It’s not just Marvel. All the franchises are struggling. Even Star Wars had to cancel a show after one season. DC had a string of bombs. Star Trek hasn’t been able to get a movie out in almost a decade.
COVID changed audiences’ views on the theater experience and the boom and bust of the streaming wars left audiences oversaturated across the board.
I have to agree with Moo that if you haven’t seen a Marvel movie since the original Iron Man your perspective is a little dated. Watch what you want to watch, by all means, but I doubt the recent Fantastic Four’s box office take had much to do with Tobey Maguire’s third Spider-Man movie being a step down from the first two.
I will concede when I went to Iron Man in 2008, I didn’t think I was watching the beginning of something called the MCU. It was just another Marvel adaption in a decade of Marvel adaptions. I didn’t even stay for the end credits. I didn’t know it was a thing.
@Thom H: 100% agree, give me enthusiastic creators with wild ideas rather than “back to basics” franchise slop. They don’t always hit, but I’d rather read something interesting than something that’s just competent.
Marvel’s been feeling creatively stagnant lately. There are exceptions, including the Ultimate line and FF. Some of their comics featuring less-typical takes on their characters didn’t take off: romance comic She-Hulk, political/business- intrigue Iron Man, community-focused NYX, comedy X-Factor, etc. I don’t count the solo X-books in this category, incidentally, they go in the “solo X-books don’t usually sell” bin.
Several Marvel mainstays have had books cancelled and relaunched in the last few years, or will have that happen soon, without changing the writers: FF, Moon Knight, DD, She-Hulk, Hulk,,Venom,Thor, I’m sure there are more that I’m forgetting.
Marvel’s made several creative moves that fans didn’t like: Krakoa in general/Krakoa lasting too long/ Krakoa comics going downhill on one hand, ending Krakoa/screwing up the fall of Krakoa and relaunching w/ FtA on the other; events that are well-executed, but not super-exciting and last too long; PAUL!!!: GODS; Ahmed’s run on DD; whatever’s going on w/ Venom; Aaron’s Avengers being bad and McKay’s Avengers having pacing issues; etc. Fans have been excited over a few projects, like the Ultimate books and Magik, but not enough to reignite the whole line.
Plus, comics are too expensive in general, reading for pleasure is down, it’s hard for new readers to know where to start, etc.
I think Marvel’s readership is slipping away, or cutting their consumption down to only the books that they really like. The Big 2 go through regular bouts of highs and lows, and I’m not predicting disaster for Marvel. Still, I wonder if many readers who haven’t stuck with Marvel books will come back for their next big thing.
“Binary series will feature Carol Danvers with the power of the Phoenix force.”
And here I was hoping that the Krakoan era revelations about the Phoenix would stop it being moved around hosts and kept as a purely mutant thing from now on.
Yeah, I agree. Marvel’s mostly lost its edge lately. At the same time, DC has been more interesting creatively. It would be nice if both of them could be doing top tier work at the same time, but that doesn’t seem to be possible.
I chalk it up to not enough excellent writers. Artists for both companies are hitting it out of the park, but writers who can anchor a line seem pretty scarce.
You know it’s bad when the Big 2 are doing a crossover and they have to bring Grant Morrison back to write it. I mean, they were basically retired from comics work.
Another veteran, Mark Waid, is writing much of the good stuff at DC. Scott Snyder was hired to spearhead the Absolute line, but even he’s almost 50.