Last September, a group of Marvel creatives, including studio boss Kevin Feige, gathered in Palm Springs for the studio’s annual retreat. In most years, the mood would have been confident – even cocky – given how the leading superhero brand, owned by Disney since 2009, has reshaped the entertainment business in its image.
But the occasion was fraught with angst – everyone at Marvel was reeling from a series of on-screen disappointments, a legal scandal involving one of its biggest stars, and questions about the viability of the studio’s ambitious strategy to expand the brand beyond films and into streaming. The most pressing issue discussed at the retreat was what to do with Jonathan Majors, the actor who was set to power the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but who faces a high-profile trial in New York later this month on the allegations domestic violence. The actor insists he is the victim, but the damage to his reputation and the possibility that he could lose the case has forced Marvel to rethink its plans and launch the next phase of its interlocking series of sequels, spin-offs and series to focus on Major’s villainous character. Kang the Conqueror.
At the Palm Springs meeting, executives discussed replacement plans, including switching to another comic antagonist such as Dr. Doom. But any move would bring its own headaches: Majors has already been a major presence in the MCU, including as a scene-stealing antagonist in February’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” And he’s been positioned as the franchise’s next big thing in this season of “Loki” – particularly in the finale, which airs Nov. 9 and makes Kang the titular star of a fourth “Avengers” film in 2026.
Rafa Alvarez for Variety
“Marvel is really screwed with the whole Kang angle,” says a top dealmaker who saw the latest “Loki” episode. “And they haven’t had a chance to rewrite until recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see any way they can move forward with him.”
Aside from the bad press for the majors, the brain trust at Marvel is also struggling with the November release of “The Marvels,” a sequel to the 2019 blockbuster “Captain Marvel,” which was plagued by lengthy reshoots and is now tanking at the box office probably won’t convince office.
This is all an unprecedented turn of fortune for a company that has enjoyed a near-uninterrupted string of hits since it began producing its films independently with 2008’s “Iron Man.” That wildly profitable run culminated in the $2.8 billion hit of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” a high for the studio, which has earned nearly $30 billion across 32 films.
Reproducing such a phenomenon is never easy. However, the cause of Marvel’s current problems can be traced back to 2020. Back then, the COVID pandemic led to a mandate to boost Disney’s stock price with an endless stream of interconnected Marvel content for the studio’s fledgling streaming platform, Disney+. The plan is that there will never be any interruptions in the superhero scene, as there is always either a movie coming out or a new TV series.
But the ensuing spandex tsunami proved to be too much of a good thing, and the demands of producing so many programs strained the Marvel apparatus. Additionally, the need to carve out an interwoven storyline from so many different shows, films, and platforms resulted in a convoluted narrative that baffled viewers.
“The Marvel machine has been pumping out a lot of content. Did it get to the point where it was just too much and people got burned out on superheroes? “It’s possible,” said Wall Street analyst Eric Handler, who covers Disney. “The more you do, the harder it is to maintain quality. They tried to incorporate some new characters like Shang-Chi and Eternals, but had mixed results. With budgets this big, you need home runs.”
“The Marvels,” which hits theaters Nov. 10, will struggle to get the ball across the infield, at least by Marvel’s outsized standards. The film, which cost $250 million and stars Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel, is expected to gross $75 million to $80 million – far less than the $185 million earned by “Doctor Strange”. the Multiverse of Madness” took in its domestic debut weekend last year.
Directed by Nia DaCosta, The Marvels reunites Larson’s heroine with two superpowered allies: Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau (introduced in the 2021 Disney+ series WandaVision) and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (first appearing in the series Ms. Marvel from 2022). ). But rather than seamlessly building on the success of Captain Marvel, this move resulted in four weeks of reshoots to give coherence to the convoluted plot.
Then eyebrows were raised again when DaCosta began work on another film while The Marvels was still in post-production – the filmmaker moved to London earlier this year to begin prep for her Tessa Thompson drama Hedda” to begin. (A representative for DaCosta declined to comment.)
“When you’re directing a $250 million movie, it’s kind of strange that the director quits with a few months off,” says a source familiar with the production.
“The Marvels” also had its release date pushed back twice, once to swap places with “Quantumania,” which was considered more advanced, and again when its debut was pushed back from July to November to give the filmmakers more time to tinker admit. But that extra time didn’t necessarily help. In June, Marvel, which traditionally only solicits feedback from Disney employees and their friends and families, took the unusual step of holding a public test screening in Texas. Audiences gave the film mediocre reviews.
Francesco Francavilla for Variety
But Marvel was never about being average. “Kevin’s true superpower, his genius, has always been in post-production, getting his hands on films and making sure they’re finished well,” the source adds. “He’s few and far between these days.” (Feige declined to comment for this story.)
Feige isn’t the only person showing signs of overwork. Marvel’s entire VFX battalion, including staff and vendors, is struggling to keep up with the never-ending flood of productions. When the credits rolled on the world premiere of Quantumania last February, there was shock at the Regency Village Theater in Westwood over poor CGI. “There were at least 10 scenes where the visual effects were added at the last minute and were out of focus,” says a veteran agent who was there. “It was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career. Everyone was talking about it. Even the children of executives talked about it.”
The scheduling swap with The Marvels meant the Ant-Man sequel came under pressure and the post-production schedule was extended by four and a half months. Marvel films are known for being straight to the point, given Feige’s ability to “foam the runway and land a plane that way,” says an executive familiar with the company’s operations. But this level of unfinishedness was unprecedented and was cited in scathing reviews when the $200 million tentpole opened 11 days after its premiere. It wasn’t just critics who were dismayed. Tired of 14-hour days and no overtime, Marvel VFX employees voted unanimously to unionize in September, setting off an industry-wide trend.
“2023 was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says former Marvel Studios VFX coordinator Anna George, who appeared before the Congressional Labor Caucus on October 19 to discuss the studio’s untenable deadlines and working conditions to testify. “The pay and long hours at Marvel were the reason we had to begin our union process there. The conditions were completely untenable.”
Disney’s top executives, including newly returned CEO Bob Iger, were said to be apoplectic about Marvel’s VFX problems. A month after the premiere debacle of “Quantumania,” the guillotine fell on Victoria Alonso, who oversaw the studio’s physical production, post-production, VFX and animation. Her unauthorized role as executive producer at the Oscars was cited as the reason for her abrupt dismissal.
In the nominated film “Argentina, 1985,” insiders said Disney was upset that the quality control of its Marvel productions had plummeted, particularly in the ever-expanding TV space. The VFX standstill has been evident for some time, with some final effects for Disney+ series like WandaVision and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law being added after their streaming debuts. That Alonso was busy promoting their arthouse project while Rome burned certainly didn’t sit well with Disney’s leadership. (Alonso’s lawyer says her client cannot comment.)
However, some internal sources suggest that Alonso was a scapegoat, pointing to She-Hulk’s VFX problems as a symptom of a deeper decay – namely a lack of control over script development. In the original She-Hulk story arc, a flashback to star Tatiana Maslany’s transformation into her Hulk character didn’t occur until Episode 8, the penultimate episode. But after watching the footage, Marvel’s brain trust realized the scene had to happen in the pilot episode so audiences could see more of the character’s backstory early on. This meant the VFX team was tasked with fixing the mess in post-production.
“The so-called bad VFX we see were due to half-baked scripts,” says a person involved in “She-Hulk.” “That’s not Victoria. This is Kevin. And even about Kevin. These issues should be addressed in pre-production. The schedule does not allow Marvel executives to be satisfied with the material.”
Marvel was hemorrhaging money all the time: A single episode of “She-Hulk” cost around $25 million, dwarfing the budget of an episode of the final season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” albeit without a similar zeitgeist -Kick. The series premiere in August 2022 at the El Capitan Theater was a foretaste of what would happen six months later at the “Quantumania” event: the “She-Hulk” special effects were out of focus in several scenes.
There are signs that the flood of products is leading to shutdowns. “I’m not prepared to talk about a permanent fall. “But based on the numbers associated with Marvel podcasts, Marvel articles, and friends who do Marvel-based video coverage, all of those numbers have dropped significantly,” says Joanna Robinson, co-author of the New York Times bestseller “MCU : The Reign of Marvel Studios,” author and podcaster at The Ringer. “The quality suffers. At the height of 2019, if you put “Marvel Studios” in front of something, people would say, “Oh, that brand represents quality.” That association no longer exists because there were so many projects that felt half-baked and half-baked. “
Clockwise from left: Jonathan Majors in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”; Iman Vellani, Brie Larson and Teyonah Parris in “The Marvels”; Tatiana Maslany in “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” Courtesy of Marvel
As public criticism mounts, Feige is pulling the plug on scripts and projects that aren’t working. Case in point: the Blade reboot. With Mahershala Ali signed on for the eponymous role of a vampire, a 2023 release date looked promising. But the project went through at least five writers, two directors and a standstill six weeks before production. A person familiar with the script variations says that at some point the story morphed into a female-led narrative full of life lessons. Blade was relegated to the fourth lead role, a bizarre idea considering the studio had two-time Oscar winner Ali on board.
Amid reports that Ali was ready to quit because of script problems, Feige went back to the drawing board and hired Michael Green, the Oscar-nominated writer of “Logan,” to start over. There’s speculation around town that the studio wants to make the film, now slated for 2025, on a budget of less than $100 million – a departure from Marvel’s big-spending strategy.
With Iger publicly acknowledging the downside of a Marvel TV overload that “dilutes focus and attention,” the comic book empire’s keepers are considering some dramatic moves. According to sources, there have been talks about bringing back the original gang for an Avengers movie. This includes the revival of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, both of whom were killed in Endgame. (That shouldn’t be a stumbling block – in comics, beloved characters are often killed off, only to be resurrected thanks to the power of things like the multiverse.) But the studio hasn’t committed to the idea yet – if any if we could bring these actors back, that would be that’s not cheap. According to sources, Downey Jr.’s starting salary for Iron Man 3 was approximately $25 million.
Will this solve the Marvel’s Majors problem? When the “Quantumania” actor was arrested in March, Disney executives insisted they could afford to play a wait-and-see game since “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” wasn’t expected to begin filming until early 2024. But then Majors was dropped by his publicists and managers in quick succession. (He remains a client at WME — the agency he landed at after CAA parted ways with him before his arrest over his “brutal behavior” toward employees, a source says. CAA declined to comment.) In April, more alleged domestic Violence victims of Majors began cooperating with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Then, ahead of a key hearing in October, media outlets including Variety obtained a court filing detailing a police incident in London involving Majors that led to his ex-girlfriend seeking medical attention. To make matters even more difficult, the ex-girlfriend also worked as a movement trainer on Quantumania and the London incident occurred while the Majors were filming Season 2 of Loki. On October 25, a New York judge denied Major’s request to dismiss the case, ensuring the actor will stand trial in late November. His legal team is trying to keep parts of the case secret.
A studio source points out that despite the actor’s legal troubles due to Quantumania’s box office, which will struggle to turn a profit, Marvel had already considered moving away from a major-led phase. “It worried people because ‘Quantumania’ didn’t really land,” the source says. (On October 27, Disney removed another majors film, Searchlight’s “Magazine Dreams,” from its release calendar.)
Replacing the majors is also an option, as Feige did when he replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle in Iron Man 2. In fact, Marvel isn’t afraid to change direction even after making eye-catching announcements. Initially pitched as a series, Armor Wars is now being developed as a feature film, while the studio’s efforts to adapt the comic book Inhumans into a feature film made headlines but is currently on hold. (The now-defunct Marvel Television launched an “Inhumans” TV series in 2017 that ran for one season on ABC.)
Still, there was one bright spot in 2023: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” which became Marvel’s biggest profit of the year with $845 million worldwide. The fact that it was directed by James Gunn, now-rival DC Studios, was lost on no one.
“With Marvel, it used to be as close to a guarantee as you could get,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a box office analyst at Comscore. “So it made sense to go all out with the budgets. The success of Guardians 3 has been somewhat overlooked. But that was James Gunn and Chris Pratt, and I think that star power is becoming more and more important. Then there was “Quantummania,” with $476 million. Anything less than half a billion dollars is considered a disappointment. And these excessive expectations are the result of so many successes over the years.”
The key to Marvel’s revival could lie in the superhero arsenal that Disney acquired through its purchase of 21st Century Fox in 2019. This deal brought several blue-chip heroes, such as the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, back under the studio’s control. Fans are already buzzing about next year’s Deadpool 3, which pairs Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with the Mouth with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and a Fantastic Four reboot planned for 2025. As a bonus, the Fox additions give Feige a chance to reinvent the “X-Men” franchise, the very thing he learned as a young executive at Lauren Shuler Donner’s production company. Now that the WGA strike is in the rearview mirror, Marvel has begun talking to writers about integrating the X-Men into the MCU fold.
As Feige recalibrates, the rest of the industry fervently hopes that Marvel’s best days aren’t over.
“It would be unwise to write the Marvel obituary,” says Jason Squire, professor emeritus at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and host of “The Movie Business Podcast.” “Kevin Feige is the Babe Ruth of film executives and Marvel has the most profitable track record in film history.” No question.”