The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the biggest movie franchise on the planet, and has raked in over $28 billion at the box office. And that doesn’t include the myriad TV shows on Disney+. There’s so much MCU content now that it can be quite jarring for people looking to get into it. Many have criticized the MCU of late over this glut.
Someone who knows a lot about overseeing a sprawling, complex extended universe is Marc Guggenheim, one of the creators of DC’s Arrowverse on The CW. While he’s a massive fan of the MCU, he feels like it has fallen off since Avengers: Endgfame (2019), which marked the end of an era and the conclusion of the story arc known as the Infinity Saga. Since Endgame, the MCU has entered the Multiverse Saga, which hasn’t caught on in the same way.
“If I was suddenly in Kevin Feige’s role, basically I would do what Iger was saying, which is prune the tree,” Guggenheim told The Aarthi and Sriram Show. “You know, there’s just too much content. I’m like the biggest Marvel nerd ever, and I haven’t seen Moon Knight. I just can’t keep up. There’s just too much content.” Guggenheim is referring there to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who recently admitted that Marvel have a bit of a bloat problem.
Dose Marvel need to pull back on the MCU?
Guggenheim is also worried that crossovers are becoming increasingly more important. Now you can’t watch one movie or show without having already watched what came before. “To me the difference between Phase 4 and Phases 1 through 3 is fundamentally something very simple, which is you could even be watching ‘Infinity War’ without having seen the prior X number of movies,” he said.
As an example of this, he cites Captain America: The Winter Soldier: “Winter Soldier was its own movie with a beginning, middle, and end. And yet, that movie set the foundation for things that, you know it didn’t deal with Infinity Stones, but it did deal with Hydra and SHEILD and Steve Rogers’ relationship with the government and the Winter Soldier.”
And then there’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which required fans to have subscribed to Disney+ and watched through WandaVision to understand Wanda’s motivations:
"Compare that with ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ where in order to understand the villain of the movie, you had to watch – not a movie – another TV show. A TV show that you had to spend money to subscribe to the service that aired it. That’s the problem. Each of these movies in Phases 1 through 3, they all stood on their own. Look I get it."
For the first time, it does feel like superhero fatigue is starting to settle in over the MCU. Is it time for Feige to reinvent the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
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