Following the film business can be a disorienting experience, because the narrative seems to change every few months. Movies are dying. Movies are back. Streaming is killing movies. Streaming is saving movies. Nobody goes to theaters anymore. “Barbenheimer” saved theaters. Taylor Swift also saved theaters. And so on.
But here’s a headline that seems to capture an enduring shift in momentum: 2023 marked the end of the superhero-movie phenomenon. After more than 15 years of ubiquity, big-budget comic-book adaptations about people in tight costumes wielding superhuman powers finally have loosened their grip on the cultural imagination.
Several indicators support this idea. “The Marvels” was released in November and thus far has generated the lowest box-office numbers of any film in the long-running Marvel Cinematic Universe, and will probably end up losing the studio about $300 million.
Three other Marvel movies — “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” — were among the year’s top 10, but that is the worst performance for the superhero category by that metric in nearly a decade (excluding 2020, when the pandemic shuttered theaters).
Marvel’s biggest rival, DC, had an even rockier year. “The Flash” limped into theaters following more than a decade of delays and quickly disappeared from the cultural radar. “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” stiffed when it appeared over Christmas weekend, as did “The Blue Beetle” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” earlier in the year.
The waning of this era, which began in the late 2000s, feels like a necessary and long-overdue development — an opinion that surely reflects my biases as somebody who has developed an intense distaste for this genre.
In childhood I had a vague affinity for Marvel comics, so I dutifully watched and basically enjoyed the early MCU movies, such as “Iron Man,” “Thor,” “Captain America” and “The Avengers.” But sometime around the first wave of sequels, I began to experience a fatigue that would curdle into antipathy.
Marvel and DC projects started to feel like homework for future films, all hugely budgeted and massively hyped, all tasked with launching new heroes and villains for sequels and offshoots and merchandise lines, all laboring to generate dramatic stakes that would keep audiences coming back. (Somehow the fate of the universe always dangled by a thread a few times per year on holiday weekends.)
The MCU has now ballooned to 33 movies divided into five “phases” (whatever that means), sprawling across multiverses, parallel dimensions and overlapping chronologies accessible through (gulp) time travel.
This creates an absurd barrier of entry for the handful of superhero movies that are legitimately good. Understanding any new film means tracking characters, events and magical artifacts across all or most of the preceding installments. It means remembering important reveals from post-credits scenes and interconnected streaming shows.
Who has the energy for all that? For a while, it seemed lots of people did. Five of the 10 all-time highest-grossing films are Marvel adaptations. Fourteen Marvel and DC movies have grossed more than $1 billion in the United States alone, and several more have come close.
Hollywood basically reconfigured itself to produce superhero franchise content on an assembly line. Filmmakers whose other work I love (Sam Raimi, Ryan Coogler, Chloe Zhao, Taika Waititi, etc.) received big paychecks in exchange for making comic-book movies of varying quality that essentially performed brand service.
Nearly every household-name actor by now has put on a cape and done time in front of a green screen. The computer-generated imagery pummels viewers into submission but increasingly seems half-realized, thanks to studio demands that have stretched the available workforce of visual-effects artists past its capacity.
And now audiences are losing interest and studios are finally paying attention. Reflecting on last year’s disappointments, Disney president Bob Iger admitted his company, which owns Marvel, had probably “made too many” superhero sequels.
However refreshing, self-awareness will not change anything in the immediate future. Marvel still has at least 10 movies in various stages of production or development and will launch its sixth “phase” in 2025.
But maybe by then, moviegoers will have decisively exerted the only superpower we have, which is to spend our money on something else or nothing at all.