Things have been a little… off at Marvel Studios lately. With its varsity team of heroes like Captain America and Iron Man entering retirement, the company’s attempts to find similar breakout stars among its extensive back catalog of heroes have proved less sure of success. The latest to land in theaters, “The Marvels,” was plagued by the need for extensive reshoots, a relatively weak opening, and a massive drop in second-week box office figures.
That’s not to say that the hit factory behind “Avengers: Endgame,” the second-biggest box office smash of all time, is preparing to shutter. If anything, the “The Marvels” is the biggest victim yet of a strategy from Marvel, and its parent company Disney, to rush an endless stream of content out the studio door. It’s reminiscent of a period that brought Marvel Comics itself to the brink of total collapse in the 1990s. If the company’s executives are looking for a supervillain in all of this, they should start by looking in the mirror.
Now, comics weren’t just a fun read for kids — they were an investment.
Let’s jump back to the late 1980s and early ‘90s, a time when superhero comics suddenly became a literal hot commodity. Tim Burton’s “Batman” — based on a character from DC Comics, Marvel’s eternal rival — was a blockbuster success, helping to revive interest in the genre as a whole. A new stable of artists like Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee were reinvigorating the industry. And the first Sotheby’s auction of old comic books saw issues selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Now, comics weren’t just a fun read for kids — they were an investment. This shift spawned a legion of speculators and collectors who scoured publications like Wizard Magazine, which listed the estimated value of back issues each month, turning comic shops into mini-stock market trading floors.
Marvel responded by leaning into the craze. Limited-edition variant covers became all the rage, sending collectors scrambling to seek out each version in the hopes of completing the set. Soon, comics stores were all ashimmer with holographic and embossed covers gleaming from the shelves. At the same time, the entire industry coalesced around Diamond Comics Distributors, which from the early 1990s until 2020 was the only middleman between the publishers and comic book shops. The latter placed preorders with Diamond for how many copies of a title they thought they’d sell, which would then determine how many issues the publishers printed — and preorders had gone through the roof.
Some artists and writers were uncomfortable with the mania, but executives were more concerned with how much cash was flowing in. Publishers produced more and more copies of issues like they were printing money. But here’s the problem with printing money: Currency loses value as more of it floods the market. When Amazing Fantasy #15, which introduced Spider-Man to the world, was first published, it was mostly seen as cheap garbage that wasn’t worth keeping around. “Ironically, it was that disposability that led to the scarcity which afforded older comics their inherent value, a fact that was widely ignored but that would become monumentally important in the following boom and inevitable crash,” journalist Rosie Knight wrote about the era.
It didn’t take long for buyers to realize what was happening. By 1993, the gold rush suddenly came to a halt. “When they found their copy of Bloodshot No. 1 was worthless because everyone owned that comic, that helped spark the bust in sales that crushed the industry for the rest of the decade,” Jason Sacks, author of the “American Comic Book Chronicles” series, told The Hollywood Reporter. A number of smaller publishers folded entirely as Marvel and DC struggled to hang on in the wake of a massive drop in new comic book sales.
Marvel Comics filed for bankruptcy in 1996, before being purchased by Toy Biz, a company that produced action figures based on Marvel’s characters. Its new owner, Isaac Perlmutter, saw that the real value of the company wasn’t necessarily in comic books themselves, but in the intellectual property its characters represented. After the success of movies like “X-Men” (2000) and “Spider-Man” (2002) at other studios, Marvel decided to roll the dice on producing its own major motion picture. The result was “Iron Man” (2008), which launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the juggernaut it is — or, potentially, was.
The result has been an overwhelming amount of content, even for a true believer like me.
Because it feels all too likely that we’re living through a replay of history, as the bubble of enthusiasm for superhero content pops thanks to a glut in the market. When the Covid-19 pandemic closed movie theaters, Disney (which purchased Marvel in 2009) chose that moment to boost the launch of its Disney+ streaming service. The new mandate was that “there would never be a lapse in superhero fare, with either a film in theaters or a new television series streaming at any given moment,” as Variety recently put it.
The result has been an overwhelming amount of content, even for a true believer like me. The list of movies and TV shows that I haven’t watched has only continued to grow, even as the storylines become more intertwined. And while that connective tissue was part of the magic of the early MCU and Marvel Comics more broadly, we’ve gone beyond the kind of linear sequels that your average moviegoer expects. It would be one thing if “The Marvels” was a straightforward sequel to 2019’s “Captain Marvel.” But at a certain point, you can’t count on everyone to do the homework of watching the requisite seasons of multiple TV shows before going to see a new movie (regardless of how good “Ms. Marvel” and “WandaVision” may have been).
Worse, that oversaturation has shown a marked decline in quality. An overburdened production schedule has left the visual effects workers that bring these movies to life scrambling to meet shifting deadlines. It’s clear, too, that Kevin Feige, the studio president and creative engine of the MCU, is being pulled in too many directions in this new era. The result has been a rise in obviously incomplete effects in multimillion-dollar movies and Marvel’s VFX artists unionizing to push back on the grueling hours demanded of them.
Again, I’m not saying that Marvel Studios is on the brink of collapse. The revival of Marvel writ large shows that any death might be as temporary as the classic superhero trope suggests. But it’s just as clear that the House That Kevin Built is stretched too thin. And it’s imperative that the studio’s Disney overlords recognize that the market for superhero content isn’t as unbreakable as adamantium. Without a recommitment to quality over quantity, there’s a good chance that the Marvel Cinematic Universe implodes, crushed under its own weight.
