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Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. ‘The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,’ he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster The Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some cinemas in America, eager to fill the demand, screened the film over and over for 72 straight hours.
Actors start on the indie circuit and end up in front of green screens, wearing underpants outside of their clothes
Now everything’s coming up Scorsese. The Marvel strongmen have fallen from the sky and landed, cape-first, onto concrete. Last year’s The Marvels, a group outing of female superheroes, made a profit of only $47 million on its $200 million budget – the lowest box-office takeaway of any Marvel film. The film blog Deadline blames Disney+ streaming services. In its on-demand delivery of superhero ‘content,’ it does away with most of the magic of a cinema visit. Fair enough. But there are other dimensions to the decline.
I survey friends who like superhero films, only to find they’ve all gone off Marvel films. One says she hasn’t seen a Marvel film in nearly six years because the plots are too complicated. All of the heroes operate in the same universe: you have to have watched every Marvel release of the last decade to understand whatever they put out next. Another used to watch the films regularly but found that the different fight scenes started to merge into each other. Some pin the decline to the birth of Disney+ and others to the release of Endgame, which killed off several of the franchise’s most recognisable characters.
“}]] Marvel studios, creator of The Avengers, Ironman and Guardians of the Galaxy, seems to be losing market share at the box office. Read More