The success of James Gunn’s Superman, the start of a new era of DC Comics movies, proves that the idea of “superhero fatigue” among audiences is a myth. That’s according to Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, who has also reflected on where many MCU entries have gone wrong in recent years.
With $407 million earned to date, Superman has ensured Gunn’s DCU is off to a strong start. “I liked it a lot,” Feige said, as part of a roundtable interview attended by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. “I love you just jump right into it. You don’t know who Mister Terrific is? Tough, you’ll figure it out. This is a fully fleshed out world.”
But while moviegoers don’t seem tired of every superhero movie, they certainly seem tired of some. Since Avengers: Endgame, Marvel has suffered from a number of high-profile flops, including The Marvels and The Eternals, and a string of medicore review scores, such as for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Captain America: Brave New World.
Even this year’s Thunderbolts*/The New Avengers — by all accounts a critical success — underperformed at the box office. Now, Feige has discussed where Marvel has been going wrong — and a lot of it comes down to the sheer volume of content it has pumped out.
“We produced 50 hours of stories between 2007 and 2019,” Feige said, referencing the period from Iron Man to Spider-Man: Far From Home dubbed the Infinity Saga. Compare that to the six years since, and the difference is remarkable.
“We’ve had well over 100 hours of stories — in half the time,” Feige continued, referencing everything released since Black Widow began the subsequent Multiverse Saga in 2021. “That’s too much.” Add in Marvel’s animated series, and the total climbs to 127 hours.
“For the first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” Feige stated, before going on to explain why — a mandate from Disney to increase production and ensure streaming service Disney+ was a success.
“We always had more characters than we could possibly make because we weren’t going to make a movie a month. Suddenly, there’s a mandate to make more. And we [said], ‘Well, we do have more’.
“It was a big company push, and it doesn’t take too much to push us to go, ‘People have been asking for Ms. Marvel for years, and now we can do it? Do it! Oscar Isaac wants to be Moon Knight? Do it!’ So there was a mandate that we were put in the middle of, but we also thought it’d be fun to bring these to life.”
Defending Marvel’s decision to massively expand its output, Feige said that it had been right to take risks and that some Disney+ series had been praised for their quality — such as Wandavision and Loki. Ultimately, though, the level of expansion had “devalued” the overall offering.
“I’ve always thought if you take success and don’t experiment with it and don’t risk with it, then it’s not worth it,” Feige said. “What we also ended up focusing on because of Disney+ was expansion — and it’s that expansion that I think led people to say, ‘It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?'”
Feige blamed The Marvels’ poor box office performance on this issue — the fact that only Brie Larsen’s Captain Marvel had wide audience recognition, while co-stars Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau originated in Disney+ series some hadn’t watched.
“I think The Marvels hit it hardest where people are like, ‘OK, I recognize her from a billion-dollar movie. But who are those other two? I guess they were in some TV show. I’ll skip it,'” Feige said.
The same issue was then experienced by Thunderbolts*/The New Avengers — despite Marvel making as much as it could out of the film’s connections to the forthcoming The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Avengers: Doomsday.
“Thunderbolts* I thought was a very, very good movie,” Feige said. “But nobody knew that title and many of those characters were from a [TV] show. Some [audiences] were still feeling that notion of, ‘I guess I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is.’ If you actually saw the movie, that wouldn’t be the case, and we make the movie so that’s not the case. But I think we still have to make sure the audience understands that.”
As a result, Marvel Studios will now reduce its output — with a maximum of three films in a year, and potentially just a single Disney+ series. Notably, the studio has also focused its slate on a selection of upcoming films that feel like sure-fire successes: Avengers: Doomsday, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Avengers: Secret Wars.
Beyond these, a “reset” version of the MCU will continue with a new X-Men reboot. Black Panther 3 is also in production, and — at some point — Marvel says it will still launch its long-gestating new take on Blade.
Speaking in the same interview, Feige also revealed that Sony has told Marvel to “stay away” from a live-action Miles Morales Spider-Man, and that Marvel contacted Robert Downey Jr. to play Doctor Doom after realising “Kang wasn’t big enough”, long before the departure of Jonathan Majors.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
