The rise and fall of Marvel Studios as a cultural juggernaut will be studied for decades to come. The brand’s rise from niche characters to global domination was unprecedented and historic, but so too has been their subsequent fall from grace over the course of the 2020s.
Following the record-breaking success of Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the combination of overwhelming amounts of success and Disney’s push to create more content resulted in the brand expanding in seemingly every direction. The studio was suddenly making more movies than ever before, making bespoke seasons of streaming television, and introducing a whole slew of new characters.
The resulting expansion could certainly feel jumbled and had its fair share of duds, but it also contained some really stellar projects as well. Rather, what seemed to really seal the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s fate was the studio’s seeming inability to realize what was resonating with audiences and capitalize on it in a meaningful way. Because one of the few genres in which they found success time and again during this period was horror. And yet, the studio continued to shy away from the genre, rather than leaning into this palpable hunger.
Undoubtedly, one of the most critical missteps in the entirety of the MCU was the studio’s decision to put all of their eggs in the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania basket. The Peyton Reed-directed threequel was upsized from the small-scale antics of the previous two installments to instead become a gargantuan, overblown blockbuster with multiverse-ending stakes. On top of this, the film was being used to introduce the character of Kang the Conqueror, the franchise’s overarching new big bad. However, the film proved to be an unmitigated disaster fort the studio, netting scathing reviews from audiences and critics alike and failing to become a hit.
However, within the same timeframe that this was happening, projects like Werewolf by Night, Moon Knight, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness were all outperforming expectations. These were some of Marvel’s first genuine attempts to experiment within the horror genre and they paid off in spades. Multiverse of Madness remains one of the most financially successful films Marvel has released this decade. And yet despite that, there has been zero movement on follow-ups to any of these projects, or any other horror media at all in the years since.
In many ways, this is similar to how the studio similarly found success with a project like Shang-Chi, only for that film to never get a follow-up of any kind for several years. Instead, Marvel has consistently been chasing these large-scale blockbuster efforts that fall flat with audiences, and has put themselves out of step with the cinema-going culture as a result. The horror genre is thriving right now, as evidenced by horror films like Obsession or Backrooms, to the extent that even Marvel’s primary competitor, DC Studios, is getting in on the action with this year’s Clayface.
Marvel had the opportunity to get in on all of this years ago, and simply opted not to. Rather than embracing the horror genre as a new avenue for this interconnected franchise to explore in a meaningful way, the studio has shied away from it at every turn. Even their planned Blade movie has failed to get off the ground time and again, showcasing precisely how much their inability to commit to the genre has backfired on them.
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