How Disney Killed the $uperhero Genre
And they pulled the same catastrophic mistake with "Star Wars" too. But tanking Marvel's quality in favor of quick cash-grabs left a more devastating cultural blow.
The very worst thing to happen to the science fiction and fantasy genre—and I group them now together just as one genre, rather than separate the two—was when the Disney corporation purchased its two most successful intellectual properties: the Marvel universe and the Star Wars universe.
Gaining control of both of these creations for $8 billion (in 2009 and 2012 respectively) was seen at the time as a massive coup and in general a good thing for fans of both franchises. Now Disney would have the resources to make a ton of movies and TV shows which fans were eager to see.
This Marvel Cinematic Universe that Kevin Feige had built could no grow like the entire printed comics interconnected universe. And in Disney+ TV shows, Disney could plumb the depths of Star Wars lore, taking characters and time periods only hinted at in the movies and turn them into whole TV shows.
And now, more than a decade later, what has been the result? Feige, the man most responsible for making it all happen, the mega-producer behind “Iron Man,” “The Avengers,” and what the Disney Marvel universe has now become, has admitted what a lot of us saw happening in real time:
Disney made too much Marvel and Star Wars content way too fast.
It's a principle many of us know but that infuriates ignorant people who don't get it and demand all three:
Quantity
Quality
Speed
Pick 2
These three values are in conflict and any effort to increase one will result in the diminishment of one of the other two. You can have a balance of all three, but in that case, you're just sacrificing a bit of all three to achieve an artificial balance, so it's not inherently better.
Disney chose quantity and speed. They thought that the way to make a lot of money was to not focus as much on making a quality product. They did not respect their viewers' taste and intelligence, thinking that just by sticking characters and stories in the Marvel and Star Wars universes that desperate fans would eat it up.
And it turns out they were right, at least from a financial perspective. Disney has more than made back their investments in Marvel and Star Wars. The Star Wars merchandise alone brings in a billion dollars a year and Disney says they have made $12 billion in profit from the franchise. And with Marvel they have reportedly taken in $13.2 billion in value.
But how long can this last given the diminished quality of the output over the last decade?
Think of it like a fast food restaurant. A new CEO could snap up a beloved chain. And he decides that the way to make more money is to introduce more options on the menu to appeal to more customers and to increase the speed of the service so that more customers can be served in a day. More products to buy, more people to be served (such as through streaming) and surely there is more money to be made?
Well, the performance of recent Marvel movies suggests this approach may be starting to run its course, particularly shown by what came in from the “Fantastic Four” movie as
explained today:
[And, I’m sorry, but I have to interject: the “Fantastic Four” have to be some of the most massively boring characters in the entire Marvel universe. I’ve felt this way since I was in third grade and haven’t changed that position ever since. Why they keep making movies based on them is a mystery answered only by stupidity and money.]
When you like a burger joint, you don't need more options on the menu and you're willing to wait 15 or 20 minutes for the tasty burger rather than rushing for a 5-minute crap burger.
This is what happens when commerce comes to trump creativity and artistry. Focus too much on trying to give some “audience” of “fanboys” what they want and you won't discover something they don't know they want. Likewise, trying to turn Marvel and Star Wars into girl-centric properties as Kathleen Kennedy attempted, has further failed spectacularly and only alienated the original generations of fans.
The concepts of the Marvel comics and Star Wars were new innovations during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s repackaging tried-and-true mythological concepts. The first round of Marvel and DC comics movies from 1998 through 2012 or so were new innovations repackaging these comics characters in refreshing, exciting ways.
But at this point, the special effects and shared universe tricks that were so exciting and innovative 15 years ago and 45 years ago have grown stale for those of us who have grown up on them. Perhaps younger generations may find them new, but I suspect more and more will not.
There aren't many great millennial filmmakers today, so many who would have become them like Gen-Xers did in the late 1980s through the early 2000s, instead chose to focus on YouTube, social media, and podcasts instead. Those were a lower barrier of entry, much like how blogging was for me as a writer and journalist.
And I suspect with Gen-Zers it will be even fewer. TikTok is the medium of choice for their generation, and for Gen-Alpha theirs will infuse AI into characters and scenarios.
Which is more exciting, watching a 90 minute movie with a character, or directly engaging with that character yourself and an adventure you experience with them?
Those of us who have been raised on novels, feature films, extended narrative TV shows like “Twin Peaks,” “Deadwood,” “Breaking Bad”—we're going to age and slowly die away as the Boomers are. These mediums, including the printed comic books, just are not hitting the emerging generations the way they did for the rest of us.
These comic book characters and Star Wars heroes made the leap from the printed page and the cinema to streaming shows, action figures, and video games, but that has come at the cost we have seen over the last 10 years in which the quality has clearly diminished.
Can these characters and universes survive a further leap from their original mediums?
I'm just not sure anymore that is going to happen.
This may not just be the slow death of the superhero genre and the extended science fiction universe, but it could be film, TV, and books as we understand them.
We're already grappling with the reality here at God of the Desert Books that we're more an ebook and email subscription company with print books just as a side offering. It’s depressing.
That's the way the future is going, just as for Disney, putting out superhero movies and streaming TV shows is just a side offering to selling plastic Baby Yoda shampoo bottles across the street at Walmart.
So where can we go for something fresh in science fiction and fantasy now that superhero comics and the big franchises have seemed to run their course?
As I argued last month: it’s time to go back and rediscover what sci-fi and fantasy was from 1900-1940, before World War II and the Cold War so crushed the sense of optimism these stories once had. Check out my piece last month inspired by Alan Moore’s books with ideas suggesting how we might do this:
