Why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Failing

New book details the origins of the MCU’s decline

I don’t intend to spend a lot of time focusing on comics in this space but reading “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards sparked some thoughts from me as a creator and a fan. Thanks to them, I think I better understand what went wrong with Marvel Studios in recent years.

This is likely to be the most in-depth history of Marvel Studios we will get, although I felt the authors sometimes were too easy on their subjects. To their credit, they do address a few previously reported problems with Marvel’s process and most of the controversies that sprang up over its history. But most importantly for disappointed fans, they provide insight into what I think are the seeds of the downfall of the MCU.

SCRIPTS? WHAT SCRIPTS? Very few MCU movies began shooting with a completed and settled script, going all the way back to the beginning with Iron Man. That story developed as it was shot, with star Robert Downey, Jr. providing a significant amount of improvision. Co-star Jeff Bridges recalled the situation: “It drove me absolutely crazy until I made a slight adjustment in my brain, and that adjustment was, ‘Jeff, just relax. You’re making a $200 million student film. Just relax and have fun.”

From that point on, just about every MCU movie tossed the original script once production began. Most of the directors they hired re-wrote the scripts, even some of the stars, like Downey and Edward Norton got involved in re-writes. It got so bad that many of the movies wound up in Writers Guild arbitration to ensure the original writers received proper credit.

Because the Marvel method relies on detailed story boards providing all the narrative for the action scenes – which are set in stone before production starts – the main writing tasks are usually focused on characters and dialog. I suppose for some of the more successful movies, like Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the involvement of the directors in scriptwriting paid off. But since just about every Marvel movie following Avengers: Endgame has featured numerous plot holes or puzzling choices that don’t fit with the rest of the movie, you must wonder if this fragmented approach to storytelling isn’t unraveling.

In the book, Edgar Wright’s involvement in the Ant Man movie is detailed. Written before the creation of Marvel studios, Wright’s Ant Man script bounced around Marvel for ten years before moving into production. Everyone quoted agreed that it was a beautiful script that was true to the comics. But Wright quit as director when interference from above threatened to butcher it. A new director was brought in who re-wrote it substantially, incorporating some of the management demands. Wright still received co-credit for the screenplay but what is universally agreed to have been the best script ever written for a Marvel movie was broken by the Marvel Studios system itself.

TOYS ARE FOR BOYS. Marvel Studios grew out of Marvel Enterprises, a company founded by Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad in the 1990s. Perlmutter made his fortune with a toy company, and he firmly believed that boys would only buy action figures featuring young white men. This influenced his views on the movies, since he was mainly concerned that they sell toys.

Even after the Disney merger, Kevin Fiege and Marvel Studios reported up to the Marvel Creative Committee, which was dominated by Perlmutter’s views. Scripts were forced to be re-written, discarding or reducing the roles of female or minority characters. For instance, in Thor 2, the original villain was supposed to be Hela, Goddess of Death. (A great choice!) But the Creative Committee vetoed that and actually created the character of Malkeith, the Dark Elf to replace her. The results speak for themselves.

The interference of the Creative Committee was so taxing on directors and creatives and some of their suggestions were so disastrous that Feige eventually got Disney Chairman Bob Iger to intervene and remove them from the chain of command. From that point on, Feige and Marvel Studios reported to a Disney executive, which smoothed things out and opened the door to female and minority characters.

The book doesn’t explicitly say so, but I believe the surge in female and minority representation that flooded Phases Four and Five was directly related to Feige’s previous frustration with Perlmutter’s philosophy. Unhindered, Feige promised that eventually more than half of Marvel’s superheroes would be female. Unfortunately, this turn came at the price of the demotion and outright denigration of male superheroes and the alienation of the core audience of their movies: young boys and adult male fans. Ironically, the main reason Disney had purchased Marvel in the first place was to add young men to their primarily female audience.

DISNEY MONEY. As soon as Marvel Studios became a part of the Disney empire in 2009, they gained access to Disney’s financing and marketing machine. They were no longer a tight organization operating out of shabby secondhand offices, they were moved into Disney’s sprawling Burbank complex.

Marvel didn’t change its basic production methods, but budgets swelled and more money meant more re-shoots. From the beginning, Feige had been directly involved in post-production, taking one more cut at shaping the story and ensuring that the movie connected properly to the larger Marvel Universe. Many of the famous post-credit and end credits scenes were added in post.

There is an old Hollywood saying: “We’ll fix it in post.” This is usually applied when a filmmaker realizes a scene or storyline isn’t working during filming. Many great films have been saved in post: Star Wars being the most infamous example. But many, many more have been crippled or ruined that way. At this point, it seems that Marvel is relying too heavily on fixing problems in post that could have been averted by sticking to a good script or by not relying so heavily on effects-heavy action set pieces that were locked in before filming began.

Add this to Disney’s ability to absorb box office losses, of which there have been many lately, and you lessen the pressure to change the system. I believe that the decreasing quality of Marvel’s offerings is not due to ‘too much content’ as the book hypothesizes, but the factory-like production process that squeezes out artistry in favor of formula.

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There are other problems detailed in the book: most notably how the grinding pace of production in Marvel movies burned out important contributors like John Favreau and Josh Whedon or how the sheer volume of productions overwhelmed the special effect industry. Disney has made noise about slowing the pace of output, which would certainly help, but as the book details, many of Marvel’s problems stem from the way they have operated from the beginning. For that reason, I am not optimistic that simply slowing things down will result in a return to fan-friendly, quality movies.