Deadpool 3 is Marvel’s only superhero movie in 2024 as Marvel Studios scales back

If you keep tabs on the entertainment industry, you know that Marvel Studios has been taking it on the chin recently. The latest Marvel movie, The Marvels, had the quietest opening weekend in the history of the franchise, deserved or not. Shows like Secret Invasion have been derided by critics and fans alike, and there’s a general sense that people just aren’t as excited about the Marvel Cinematic Universe as they used to be. According to The Hollywood Reporter, during an earnings call, even Disney CEO Bob Iger said that the MCU had “lost focus” due to putting emphasis on quantity over quality. A recent Variety article detailed something like a state of panic at the studio. They’ve seen better days over there.

Per THR, internal anxiety is part of the reason why Marvel has reshuffled their movie slate. Originally, they had three movies scheduled to come out next year: Deadpool 3, Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts. Now, both Captain America 4 and Thunderbolts have been delayed into 2025 (February 14, 2025 and July 25, 2025 respectively), leaving Deadpool 3 as the only Marvel moving coming out next year, on July 26.

A Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali is also scheduled for 2025, as is a Fantastic Four movie. But if Marvel is serious about turning down the water pressure on content a bit, those dates may shift a bit too.

Marvel will “likely” be “moving away” from the Kang storyline

As for The Marvels, everyone within and without is trying to parse out why it’s bombing at the box office. One “film producer” thinks it’s because the movie is continuing the stories of not only the original Captain Marvel movie, but also the TV shows WandaVision and Ms. Marvel, which asks a lot of viewers. “Why not simply make Captain Marvel 2? Why produce The Marvels when your audience identified, empathized, and even hero-identified with Brie Larson’s character? More importantly, why offer people similar or the same characters and stories that are on Disney+ if you expect them to go to a theater together? Disney/Marvel diluted their product,” the source opined to THR. “Of course, a picture works or fails for other reasons too, but losing so much value picture-over-picture is rare and hard to do.”

All of that makes sense, although you can kind of understand why Marvel decided to structure the movie like this, since former team-up movies like Captain America: Civil War were huge box office hits. Of course, that movie was a sequel to other movies, not one movie and two TV shows, so it’s not quite the same.

Still, the MCU has been built on these kinds of team-ups, with the Avengers movies being the most obvious example. Marvel was working up to another set of Avengers movies revolving around Kang the Conqueror, a new villain played by Jonathan Majors. However, due to the underperformance of movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which featured Kang in a prominent role, as well a number of scandals involving Majors, Marvel may be pulling back on that plan.

Joanna Robinson, one of the authors behind the new book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios offered an update on that score during a recent episode of the House of R podcast:

"I heard from someone recently…the screenwriter Jeff Loveness, who wrote Quantumania, was supposed to write The Kang Dynasty…anyway, it’s confirmed. I had it confirmed to me he’s no longer working for Marvel. I asked the person why, and they said the reason why is he was all wrapped up in this Kang storyline and they are likely going to be moving away from that."

Loki producer denies that they cut Kang from season 2

At the end of the day, this is all hearsay. We don’t know exactly what Marvel is planning to do next, or how panicked they are about the state of things. Speaking to TV Line, Loki executive producer Kevin Wright denied that things were as dire as the Variety article made them out to be. “That report was crazy. I’ll just say that,” he laughed. “That just shows you, I don’t know what people are talking about.”

Still, the narratives about Marvel’s downfall have gained a lot of steam. For instance, Wright has been asked if there was a Kang scene cut from the second season of Loki (the show didn’t have a post-credits scene). He denies there was. “[T]he story that is on screen is the one that we set out to make,” he said. “Our VFX is awesome, it’s so good in this episode. You can’t do that if you’re not locking that stuff in months in advance. That final sequence was eight months in the making — just in post-production, not talking about shooting. We never really had any consideration for the larger Marvel universe, and that is why these two seasons were good. We built our own corner of the sandbox, we told our own story. People got excited about that and went, ‘Oh, Kang!’ and started building on top of that. But to us, we were the keepers of nearly 12 hours of that storytelling, and we wanted that to come to a close.”

"We didn’t write any [post-credits scenes], and we certainly didn’t shoot any. A lot of people want these things to feel like contained stories. I know some people like the bigger interconnectedness. I think that’s also sometimes becoming a hindrance to some of our stories. For us, it was story closed, that was it."

I thought the Loki season 2 finale was great, and certainly didn’t need a post-credits scene. Still, with all the uncertainly in the air, I guess I get why some folk would form conspiracy theories about the lack of one.

Where does Marvel go from here? Stay tuned.

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h/t World of Reel