While I know a lot of RedState readers have sworn off anything Disney-related, many still enjoy the theater experience and love a good popcorn-munching film to enjoy with family or friends. That used to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but after Endgame, it all just kind of fell apart.
Disney became too obsessed with "the message," and everything they put out either carried some sort of social justice nod or got too wrapped up in showing how pro-feminine power it was. It was impossible to see a storyline that didn't involve it.
Despite all the superheroes and flashy CGI, Marvel became something of a one-trick pony.
But it didn't have any real competition. Warner Bros. was trying to compete with its offerings from the DCEU, but it was a disjointed mess of conflicting styles, stand-alone storylines that weren't even in the cinematic universe, and inter-studio drama that left a lot of contracts and relationships burning to ash. The chaos was so thick that at one point, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson even tried something of a power grab while filming his "Black Adam" film to seize control of it so he could try to level it all out.
So while one studio was expired butter scraped over too much bread, the other was a shaken jar of bugs.
But then Warner Bros. did something really brave for a corporation and gave James Gunn — the mind behind Marvel's "Guardians of the Galaxy" films — full control over the DC films, and Gunn did a full reset.
And it worked.
Superman and Fantastic Four came out at around the same time, and the former outperformed the latter in both money and audience scores, with Superman garnering a global box office of just under $600 million and Fantastic Four grabbing just over $472 million. Rotten Tomatoes shows both Supes and FF share a 91 percent audience rating — the only one that matters — but when you factor in other websites like Metacritic and IMDB, Superman edges out a win, but just barely.
Regardless, Supes is the clear winner. Gunn's version wasn't the GOAT, but it clearly respected the source material (despite Variety attempting to tell everyone it was a political movie and fooling a lot of people) and provided people with a fun time they didn't have to have borderline study for to keep up with it.
Read: I Saw 'Superman' and It's Both Not What You Think, and Still Everything You Expected
Read: Fantastic Four Review: Did Marvel Actually Deliver Something Worth Watching?
Marvel is tired because it's still trying to resuscitate its once powerful horse by whipping it. DC tossed its failed universe out and told Gunn to do what he wanted.
One is tired, one is fresh. One is still trying to reawaken its long-gone glory days, the other is just kind of having fun.
Which is why DC is about to boot Marvel off its crumbling throne, then perform a pretty catchy dance on the rubble.
A lot is being said about superhero fatigue, and I'm not sure it's fatigue so much as normalization. The novelty of the superhero film, at least one in an interconnected universe, has worn off. People clearly still show up to see these films, but the idea that they will ever achieve the heights that Endgame did is probably a good way off.
Now, the superhero film is just another genre like romcoms or musicals. Gunn is resetting his universe to attune to that development, and I think that's pretty clear with the way he's taking things a bit less seriously while still trying to inject heart and a bit of philosophy. Kevin Feige, Marvel's head, is still driving around his old sports car that backfires, has odd engine sounds, and takes a second to start up. Marvel's films can't seem to ditch the socio-political elements fully, and it causes them to take characters they should focus on and make them the butt of jokes.
Its past is still tripping it up, and will continue to do so until Feige is either fired or he wises up and says, "The times have changed, and so should I."
But as I wrote on Thursday, the Disney corporation's problems are unlikely to change because the infection of leftism that it embraced runs too deep. Maybe it will get it, but that's not where my money is.
Read: Disney Is Finally Realizing It Was a Bad Idea to Drive Men Away
From where I'm sitting, Marvel is about to stumble and fall hard, even with "Avengers: Doomsday" and a returning Robert Downey Jr. in the mix, and that fall is going to drive the point home even harder. At that point, Disney's hand will probably be forced one way or the other.
