“Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!” That’s what Jeff Bridges bellows about Robert Downey Jr. in the first Iron Man movie. And, for a while, it was that scrappy, improvisational Stark-like energy that made Marvel Studios special. Across three “phases” of filmmaking, Marvel combined the backbone of good superhero storytelling (likable characters, exciting action, cool special effects, compelling plots, a fun sense of humor) with the true secret sauce of the genre: meaningful storytelling themes.
Lately, however, it’s as if Marvel has forgotten that superhero stories are actually supposed to have ideas. Marvel has moved from the Age Of Heroes to the Age Of Aimless Intersecting Content. That philosophy reaches its nadir in the latest big-screen addition to the MCU, Captain America: Brave New World—a film that continues the “what are we doing here?” trend of recent Marvel projects like Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania and Secret Invasion.
It wasn’t always like this. Marvel once understood what filmmakers like Richard Donner and Sam Raimi long ago proved: More than any other genre, superhero stories are built around archetypal characters engaging in ideological battles meant to reflect something larger about the human condition. That means they need driving central themes to elevate their sometimes-thin individual components into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Beyond anything else, this is also what infected the Star Wars franchise, except there it was even worse because so much of the connective tissue was relegated to novels and comics. At least with Marvel you can keep up just via TV and movies.
Dumped into a new series of films that rehashes the first? Explain it in a bunch of mediocre books! Sequel that thinks that setup was boring (and tbf, it was)? Build up to it in a crappy comic! Petulant manchild takes the worst possible lessons from the first two? Set it up in a video game, lift the plot from old comics, and then tell your animation wunderkind that his entire live-action career will now be to “fix it.”
Disney owns the lion’s share of the blame for both franchises malaise, but fan culture enabled it by obsessing over everything, not insisting on tight storytelling (the number of online people who believe that no deleted scene is too awkward to be edited back in is… disconcerting), and whizzing their pants in glee with every easter egg or end-credits stinger. Honorable mention to Peter Jackson with the LOTR extended editions and ROTK’s eleventy-billion endings that (LOL) still somehow omitted the Scouring of the Shire.