Marvel Studios can fix the MCU — but it has to start Saturday at SDCC
In 2023, Marvel Studios took a year off from the hype house that geeks built, San Diego Comic-Con. So did basically everybody else: Between the writers’ and actors’ strikes and general production delays all around, Hollywood didn’t have much to show at SDCC last year, and the actors and writers who’d normally be the center of any presentation were busy on the picket lines.
In 2024, Marvel Studios is back in Hall H, with big plans on the horizon — the biggest in the half-decade since the release of Avengers: Endgame, though it’s coming after half a decade of erosion in the MCU’s cultural dominance. Can Marvel reclaim its status as cinema’s biggest hype machine? Sure it can, and here’s how.
A Marvel Studios Hall H panel is a brand presentation dressed up as a concert event. So it’s cynical and unsexy to say, but the bottom line is Marvel has to look like it’s going to make shareholders oodles of money between now and the next San Diego Comic-Con. After a string of Marvel box-office disappointments, from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to Eternals, that isn’t a guarantee.
Marvel is coming off its worst box-office returns ever for a mainline MCU film, and the conviction on charges of assault and harassment of the cornerstone actor of its current phase. And then there’s just general Hollywood woes — inflation, macroeconomic insecurity, the theater industry’s slow post-2020 recovery.
Of the four MCU films scheduled for 2025, one has undergone extensive reshoots and rewrites; another has been in pre-production limbo since its announcement in 2019; one is a low-buzz villain feature; and one is a tantalizing potential new start, but based on a franchise associated with three iterations of Hollywood boondoggles. The promised 2026 return of an Avengers-style teamup film looks rockier than any of them, having been scrubbed of its title and divested of its villain.
The first thing Marvel needs to do is project that’s it’s a movie studio with a confident, competent plan —
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