from Chris Snelgrove
| Published
There have been countless musings and posts on social media about the reasons for the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the most common complaints boils down to how many shows and movies feel like homework. Disney seems to expect fans to devour every bit of ancillary media to understand their latest releases. More often than not, it doesn’t really tell a complete story because the latest content spends too much time setting up what comes next. It’s a disappointing approach to blockbuster storytelling, and we can blame George Lucas and his approach to the Star Wars prequels pretty squarely for Marvel’s decline.
How Star Wars did homework for fans
At this point, you’re probably asking the obvious question: How can Star Wars prequels negatively impact the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially when The Phantom Menace came out almost a decade ago Iron Man brought MCU to life? The answer starts with Darth Maula killer new character who, despite his awesome design and instant popularity, only had three lines of dialogue. Audiences understandably had a lot of questions about his background and motivations, and were invariably told they had to go read various books and comics to find out what this guy’s whole deal was.
For the Star Wars prequels, this has become a constant problem, one Disney will reprise with Marvel after purchasing the franchise set in a galaxy far, far away. You had to read outside media to learn important lore about other villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous, and reading books and comics was also the only way to learn more about equally important relationships like the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and the marriage between Padmé Amidala and the future Darth Vader. This was, frankly, insanely lazy storytelling built on the assumption that voracious fans wouldn’t mind the expensive and time-consuming homework of additional reading.
Marvel gets its own homework
Disney has now bought Star Wars, meaning it is owned by the same monolithic studio that owns it Marvel. Unsurprisingly, Disney is playing up the backstory problem of assigning homework to the audience, hoping you’ll dig into outside media to explain major plot details like the rise of the First Order, Kylo Ren’s fall to the Dark Side, and why is the Resistance separate from the government they work to protect. What was surprising, however, is that Disney began to take this approach of getting fans to do their homework with their other blockbuster IP.
With the launch of Disney+, the House of Mouse adopted a variation (so to speak) of the homework strategy. Instead of encouraging fans to turn on books and comics to fully understand the new movies, they wanted fans to watch Disney+ shows instead. Now you have to watch WandaVision to understand both Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Agatha All together. You have to watch Loki to find out who the Big Bad is Quantum well, just as you should watch Ms. Marvel to find out who the hell this new character is The miracles is.
The irony is that fans acted like this was an annoying new storytelling decision from Disney, but the reality is that they just applied George Lucas’ annoying homework strategy to Marvel. Honestly, they had every reason to expect this strategy to work… because as disappointing as these prequels were, fans really flocked to stores to buy ancillary media and fully understand these new movies set in the far, far away galaxy. But that was because we hadn’t had any new Star Wars cinematic content since then Return of the Jedi in 1983; this strategy didn’t work for Marvel because Disney released so many so soon, effectively creating the superhero fatigue that now threatens their bottom line.
Here it is, folks: Whether fans of either franchise want to admit it, Star Wars inadvertently helped create Marvel’s biggest problem. And given that the only way to fix it is for Disney to focus less on profit and more on telling great stories, this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Pretty soon, the MCU as a whole may be a bit like Logan’s skeletal body: a beautiful corpse Deadpool you can play it when Disney needs a surefire box office hit.
