The last few weeks have seen a rare admission from Team Marvel Studios: Maybe, just maybe, it overloaded the market and the last few movies and shows kinda stunk and even a behemoth, culture-warping, mega-property needs to slow down and take a breath every once in a while. Maybe.
Which puts a lot of pressure on 2025’s The Fantastic Four. The movie, currently casting up for a mid-summer shoot ahead of its July 25, 2025 release, is Marvel’s first original-character/team launchpad since 2021’s Eternals. It’s also a property that 20th Century Fox never delivered on like its X-Men franchise — the Matt Shakman-directed reboot comes off two cartoony early-2000s versions and a grimdark reboot that was DOA. So the stakes feel high for The Fantastic Four, and Marvel’s stakeholders are showing a bit of sweat.
In a recent interview with Empire, ahead of the studio’s sole 2024 theatrical release, Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel Studios co-president Louis D’Esposito admitted that, yeah, the company obviously lost its luster after recent underperformers like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels, and critical stinkers like Secret Invasion.
“Maybe when you do too much, you dilute yourself a little bit,” D’Esposito said. “We’re not going to do that anymore. We learned our lesson.”
Echoing the point on a Disney earnings call earlier this week, CEO Bob Iger said, “we’ve been working hard with the studio to reduce output and focus more on quality,” noting that Disney would likely reduce Marvel’s theatrical output from four films a year to two or three. Kevin Feige, Marvel’s president and Hall H hypeman, suggests he prefers the scaleback — and the pressure.
“It’s nice to be able to rally behind one feature project this year,” Feige told Empire. “I’m much more comfortable being the underdog. I prefer being able to surprise, and exceed expectations. So it does seem like the last year, which has not been ideal, has set us up well for that.”
Claims of “superhero fatigue” date back
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