The new Hunger Games movie makes a great case for Marvel’s year off from MCU movies

polygon.com:

It’s been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie and, as it turns out, fans were eager to come back for more of Panem’s most brutal game show/mechanism of totalitarian control. The newest entry in the series, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, has put up an impressive box office performance so far, earning well over $100 million and going strong into its third week. But with so many other big IP movies bombing at the box office this year, it begs the question: Are other franchises releasing too many movies?

The most obvious offender here is Marvel, which had November box office news of its own: The Marvels, the latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will become the first movie in the series not to break $100 million at the domestic box office. This is devastating news for Disney. 33 movies into its run, the MCU is the biggest movie franchise of all time, so eventually the company shifted into fire hose mode, putting out as much content as possible.

Since 2017, the studio has committed to pumping out three Marvel movies a year — the only exception to this was in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. And since 2020, the studio has begun putting out several Disney Plus shows set in the MCU as well. And for most of those years, every single movie has been a hit. But fans seem to be getting a little tired of the MCU at the moment.

Meanwhile, after its hugely successful run of four movies from 2012 to 2015, the Hunger Games basically disappeared. Sure, it was still popular and had plenty of fans, but there weren’t any new additions to the story until series creator Suzanne Collins released a new prequel novel in 2020. The novel was an instant hit, and work quickly began on the movie