Trends have been a part of cinema for many years and they all seem to have key stages that I like to think of as: Beginning, promise and potential ,peak and taking chances and eventual decline. In all of the trends to hit cinema in the 21st century nothing feels quite like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Which I feel is currently in its decline stage which could also be a good chance to take a step back and look over the past fifteen years and see how it all happened right before the eyes of average film goers, the hard to please hard core Marvel Fans, the soft ones, and of course the critics and studio executives to whom results matter the most.
I feel this doesn’t actually begin in 2008 but instead in the tail end of the 1990s or the early 2000s. Up until then superhero films were either a success or failure but it seemed to be something of a gamble as to how it was going to turn out. Then something of a shift happened in the genre with films like Blade in 1998. But in the new millennium the change is even more apparent with 2000’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man which seemed to give superhero films a sense of respect that under the right circumstances they could do well.
In the years that followed there was more successes with Batman Begins that saw the start of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy and not too far behind was the ill-fated attempt to bring Fantastic Four to the screen, It did get a sequel that I don’t believe that did too well and then another attempt was made in 2015, where the results may have been worse.
This brings me neatly to the year 2008 which looking back proved to be big year for the genre. Not only did it give audiences The Dark Knight which really showed how far superhero films had come by treating the materiel as seriously as possible, even if it was clouded by the passing of Heath Ledger who won an Oscar for his performance as The Joker, and to think at this stage Batman and Robin was only ten years earlier and couldn’t have been more different from The Dark Knight if It tried. Then there was Iron Man which started life supposedly without a script and it’s main lead was acclaimed actor Robert Downey Jr. But at that time he was just starting to come back to prominence following a set of personal problems as well as picking less than perfect parts in films. Even with all that was going against it Iron Man turned out to be a huge success and even from the start the man behind it all Kevin Feige had big plans that he made clear with a post-credits scene at the end of the film featuring Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury wanting to talk to about something called The Avengers Initiative.
Iron Man wasn’t the only film in the debut year of what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe or (MCU) for short. There was also The Incredible Hulk starring Edward Norton who despite his talents was eventually replaced by Mark Ruffalo, a change that people warmed too right away.
This is part of the phase that I would call beginning, promise and potential. Iron Man was the beginning and it showed promise, and now there was hopefully a sense that there was potential for more, much more.
The start of the 2010’s gave audiences Iron Man 2 along with the first Captain America and Thor films which appeared to do well but most important of all it was setting the stage for was to come next.
I really shouldn’t have to say it but in 2012 there was only one film from the MCU, and that film was of course The Avengers or Avengers Assemble if you live in the U.K. I admit I am no expert on superhero films to know that only a few years before it came out a film like this in some peoples’ eyes would feel like a crazy dream that would have no chance of working. But of course much like Iron Man it surpassed all expectations and sent a clear message that for the foreseeable future Superhero’s films were here to stay and represented what I think of as a peak moment in the genre since now it could afford a newfound freedom to take chances with what ever the people at Marvel wanted to make next.
This is also the point where Marvel’s rival D.C tries to establish their own cinematic universe that began with 2013’s Man Of Steel. But despite their best efforts which continue to this day, they are unlikely to see much of the same level of success that Marvel has had. Once again I think that shows that in terms of business’s when one is successful, others will want the same. Even Universal tried to have one made up of classic monster that would have started with 2017’s The Mummy starring Tom Cruise, not only did the film appear to flop but they were late to the trend as it had nearly been going for a decade at that point, then Hanna-Barbera tried to have one too with 2020’s Scoob! but I think that went the same way as The Mummy, not too sure what is happening with those now but I think studios get the message that cinematic universes are not for everyone.
In the years that followed their peak, they did indeed take chances while continuing to make sequels for Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, they also started dabbling in TV Shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter. Netflix would later do the same with shows like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist, plus many others.
While that was going on Marvel felt confident enough to make films about characters like the Guardians Of The Galaxy, Ant- Man and Doctor Strange who didn’t enjoy the same recognition as someone like Spider-Man. But somehow those managed to be successful and got the characters mainstream attention thanks to those films.
Of course The Avenger’s got a sequel which came in 2015 in the form of Age Of Ultron. I doubt it did as well as its predecessor but it did well enough and of course more sequels and more films followed.
One of the main attractions of the MCU is having so many beloved characters all under one roof which meant they could interact with one another and there we would no problem with It. But it wasn’t until 2016 where one of Marvel’s most iconic characters, Spider-Man was allowed into the MCU. Which for the fans must have been a dream come true and Marvel of course made a big deal out of having him, they event went as far to practically shoehorn him into Captain America Civil War a whole year before he would get a film all to himself.
It was 2017 when I went to my first MCU film in the cinema which was Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2 which was followed that summer with Spider-Man: Homecoming. I doubt I had much of an idea just how big the MCU was, but then again Iron Man was five years old when I saw it, and both before and after I just saw a lot of posters and trailers for most of them. I do remember I once got a toy of what turned out to be the Iron Man suit that Tony uses to escape the cave at a Burger King once and I think I did know that It was from something called Iron Man, but of course I was only eight. I remember seeing adverts and promotional toys for Iron Man 2 and seeing the trailer for Iron Man 3, and for anyone who is wondering I didn’t care for Iron Man when I saw it, same goes for The Avengers. I think I only really went to Spider-Man so readily was because I liked the films that had been made with Tobey Maguire, I had seen the two Andrew Garfield ones but I don’t think too much of them.
To my mind all of this represents a period of being unstoppable and the fans were no doubt revelling in it.
MCU films always seemed to be working towards something big, with first the set of films it was all heading for The Avengers, with the second set it was going for 2018’s Avenger’s infinity War, like The Avengers the hype was beyond belief only this time there were many more characters involved that were put in the hands of a group of writers and directors. Of course this was only half of Kevin Feige’s plan, Infinity War may have been big but it was small compared to what would follow in 2019’s Avengers Endgame.
The MCU may have been riding high but they were by no means immune to controversy. In 2018 they fired James Gunn for the posting of offensive tweets from years earlier, and then right after the character’s second MCU outing, Spider- Man was taken out of it due to a rights problem with Sony. I do find It interesting to note that both of these problems did come to an end and resulted in films that seemed to bring things back to a respectable position.
Bringing things back to Avenger’s Endgame I don’t doubt for a second that what Marvel wanted from this was another peak like what The Avenger’s had back in 2012. As far as I can tell that’s exactly what they got. Just from the trailers alone you could see the scale of Infinity War as well as Endgame, I don’t know about the expectations it had to meet, or how hundreds of characters were going to be balanced out by small group of people and work. In the end it made enough to become the highest grossing film of all time, taking the title from Avatar which it would eventually reclaim.
Endgame seemed to reach heights that meant that whatever had to the task of following it, was bound to pale in comparison, that fell to Spider-Man: Far From Home. It wasn’t on the same level as Endgame but I don’t think it was trying to be.
The start of the 2020’s were not kind to any part of the film industry. But 2020 did give us the first year since 2009 where Marvel had no new films to release. 2020 may have done for nothing for them but with 2021 they turned their attention to Disney+ and between 2021 and 2022 brought out eight shows on that one service, and from what I can see some of them didn’t do that well, at all.
With cinemas open again in 2021 Marvel went back to releasing films like Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, along with the Eternals and Spider-Man: No Way Home. I think this really starts a period of still pushing on with what they have always been doing despite the signs of what would appear to be decline. The films aren’t doing as well as they use to and they seem to be everywhere you look now, not to mention that the MCU has been going on for so long now that it has reached a point where there are people that have never known a world where the MCU didn’t exist.
Marvel plans what they want to make long in advance and will likely keep to those plans as well as they can with DC’s cinematic universe hanging by a thread and just about any superhero that was not at one point part of the MCU like Fantastic Four and Deadpool look set to have a film made under their banner soon. Marvel practically have the genre all to themselves now, even X-Men looks set to join them at somepoint in the future. I don’t know if the lack of interest and sense of fatigue with Marvel based films will lead to results far from what Kevin Feigie expected or the kind that would have seemed hard to imagine just a few years ago.
In the end the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gone through all the stages of a trend and while I can’t say for sure as no one can predict the future I feel that Marvel had its moment and enjoyed it. Films were made that pleased fans, garnered critical acclaim and brought newfound respect to the genre. But it might be time to let it become a part of cinema history and give a little more space to something different, so that we may still get superhero films but not ones set in cinematic universes. Films like Joker and The Batman have shown that there is an appetite for such things, no doubt that is due to a desire to see something that is not Marvel, like all film trends it was a good idea at the time, it’s had a good run but now I think it has taken the words of Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight too literally, it was once the hero and should hopefully die that way or go on to become the villain, that is if it hasn’t already.