By Chris Snellgrove | Published
There have been countless think pieces and posts on social media about what caused the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the most common complaints is reaching too many shows and movies that feel like homework. Disney seems to expect fans to soak up all the accompanying media to understand its latest releases. Often, this doesn’t tell the full story because new content spends a lot of time setting up a following. It’s a frustrating way to tell a story, and we can blame George Lucas and his approach to Star Wars direct precursors for Marvel’s decline.
How Star Wars Did Fan Homework
At this point, you’re probably asking the obvious question: how could the Star Wars prequels negatively affect the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially if The Phantom Menace it came out about ten years earlier The Man of Steel bring the MCU to life? The answer starts with Darth Maul, a new assassin character who, despite his cool design and instant popularity, only had three lines of dialogue. Understandably, the audience had many questions about his origins and motivations and were constantly told that they had to read various books and comics to piece together what this guy was all about.
In the Star Wars prequels, that was an ongoing problem, one that Disney would repeat with Marvel after buying a franchise set in a galaxy far, far away. You had to read foreign media to learn important stories about other villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous, and reading books and comics was the only way to learn more about important relationships like the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and the marriage between of Padme Amidala and the future of Darth Vader. In fact, it was lazy storytelling built on the assumption that rabid fans didn’t care about the expensive and time-consuming homework of learning more.
Marvel Gets Its Own Homework
Now, Disney has bought Star Wars, which means it belongs to the same monolithic studio that owns Marvel. Unsurprisingly, Disney repeated the original problem of assigning homework to the audience, hoping to tap into outside sources to explain major plot details like the rise of the First Order, Kylo Ren’s fall to the Dark Side, and why the Resistance is different from the government they work to protect. What’s surprising, however, is that Disney started using this method to get fans to do homework on their blockbuster IP.
With the launch of Disney+, the House of Mouse has adopted a different (shall we say) homework strategy. Instead of encouraging fans from classic books and comics to fully understand the new movies, they wanted fans to watch Disney+ shows. Now, you have to watch WandaVision understanding both Doctor Strange and Assorted Madness again Agatha Everything Goes. You have to watch Loki understanding who the Big Bad is Quantumania it is, as you must watch Ms. Marvel understanding who this new character is Miracles is something.
Ironically, the fans reacted like this to Disney’s new offensive decision, but the truth is that they were simply using George Lucas’s offensive homework strategy at Marvel. Honestly, they had every reason to expect that this strategy would work…because they frustrated those predictions, fans literally flocked to the stores to buy the accompanying media and fully understand these new movies set in a galaxy far, far away. But that was because we haven’t had any new cinematic Star Wars content since Return of the Jedi in 1983; that strategy didn’t work for Marvel because Disney released a lot too soon, effectively creating superhero fatigue that now threatens their core mission.
There you have it, folks: whether or not fans of any franchise want to admit it, Star Wars has inadvertently helped create Marvel’s biggest problem. And considering the only way to fix it is for Disney to focus less on profit and more on good storytelling, that problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Soon, the MCU as a whole may resemble Logan’s skeleton: a nice corpse that Deadpool gets to play with whenever Disney needs a safe box office hit.
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