Marvel changing plans to recapture the zeitgeist

In an in-depth article for the Hollywood Reporter, it has been revealed that Marvel Studios is pivoting hard as it tries to overcome a series of recent obstacles to recapture the zeitgeist it imperiously commanded for over a decade.

In 2008 Marvel Studios launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, an interconnected series of superhero films which shared a single continuity, canon and cast of characters, who could pop up in one another's movies and occasionally team up for big "event" pictures. From 2008's Iron Man to 2019's Avengers: Endgame, a mind-boggling run of twenty-two films, the series rarely put a foot wrong. It dominated the box office and the cultural discourse of the time. Even its weakest entries, like Thor: The Dark World or Iron Man 2, remained watchable.

Since 2019, the franchise has faltered. Box office receipts have fallen - The Marvels became the first Marvel movie to definitively lose money at the box office in November 2023 - and critical acclaim has also dropped off sharply. Eleven further films have been released since Endgame and only a few of these - particularly Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - have garnered the type of critical and commercial success the franchise once wracked up almost automatically. There has been much discussion over why the franchise has suddenly started faltering so badly, with several problems identified:

• The loss of the franchise's most charismatic and best-written characters and the actors going along with them, most notably Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) in Endgame.
• The failure of most of the succeeding new heroes in making an impression that they can pick up the slack moving forwards.
• An increasingly tiresome inability to break free from the "Marvel format," namely a lot of quips, some action, some moderate character development and then a large setpiece CGI battle at the end, which is rarely outstanding. The few films which did experiment with this, such as Eternals adopting a more serious tone, ended up doing poorly with audiences.
• The conclusion of the mostly straightforward and well-defined Infinity Stones storyline with a well-realised villain (Thanos) and their replacement with the much murkier, more confusing Multiverse storyline and a lower-key villain (Kang) who has not resonated as strongly.
• Simple superhero fatigue: thirty-three films and ten TV series (sixteen, if you include the recently canonised Netflix series) in sixteen years is a lot, not to mention dozens more films and TV shows about superheroes from rivals DC and numerous other studios and streamers.
• An over-expansion into television as part of the streaming wars and then during COVID, bombarding audiences with new shows every few months.
• The increasing feeling that keeping up with the MCU requires having to do "homework," watching shows and films that don't appeal to you because they're going to be referenced in the next Spider-Man movie that you do care about.
• Plans to use the always-popular Spider-Man as a lynchpin for the next generation of movies hit a snag with the Sony/Marvel legal disagreement of a few years ago, which means Marvel can't use Spider-Man as a key character moving forwards when they can lose access to him at almost any time.
• The relatively rapid transition of films from the cinema to Disney+ now means that people can sit out films that look uninteresting or middling until they hit streaming, rather than having to see them in the cinema or risk falling behind the curve.

Marvel has also had to contend with a major problem from one of its tentpole actors for the next slate of films. Actor Jonathan Majors had debuted in the TV series Loki as Kang, a charismatic villain who exists in millions of different incarnations and versions across the Multiverse, a multitude of parallel universes and different timelines. The development of the Multiverse has been a major focus of the films since Endgame and has allowed Marvel to rule that other movie series using their characters - such as the X-Men and Deadpool film series from Fox and the Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man films from Sony - exist in the same Multiverse. Kang was supposed to be the lynchpin of this story moving forwards, as different versions of the character appeared in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Loki's second season, setting up a confrontation between Kang and the Avengers in two big movies coming down the pipe.

But in March 2023 Majors was arrested for assaulting his ex-girlfriend, whom he had met on the set of Quantumania. Marvel refused to take any action whilst legal action was ongoing. In December he was found guilty of two misdemeanour counts of assault and harassment. Marvel quickly confirmed they had terminated their relationship with the actor. Despite initial speculation that the character would be recast - previous different versions of characters across the Multiverse had been portrayed by different actors, with three versions of Spider-Man showing up in No Way Home to great success - it now appears that Marvel is moving away from the character and storyline altogether, minimising him in future projects and pivoting to another villain (speculated in other sources to be Doctor Doom) to be the "big bad" in the next two Avengers films coming down the line.

According to the HR article, Marvel are taking a number of further steps to address their issues. The first is a reduction of output: 2024 will see the release of just one Marvel movie, Deadpool and Wolverine, which will introduce the Merc With a Mouth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and also cement the Multiverse connections between the older X-Men films and the MCU. Only one more TV show is expected this year, Agatha: Darkhold Diaries. 2025 is expected to focus hard on the arrival of Marvel tentpole characters the Fantastic Four in the MCU, with Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn recently announced in the starring roles for the film. Marvel is hoping that the integration of the Fantastic Four into the MCU, followed later by new versions of Blade and then the X-Men, will give their franchise new legs as it - improbably - heads towards its third decade of production.

Whether these steps are going to be enough to right the ship remains to be seen, or whether at some point Disney and Marvel will have to accept that the MCU's time has simply run out and it needs to be rested for a few years before the inevitable reboot with new actors playing Iron Man, Thor and Captain America.

Slugfest: Inside the Epic 50-Year Battle between Marvel & DC by Reed Tucker

In 1961 DC Comics was the biggest comic company in the United States. Its superhero comics - Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman - were the most popular in the world and it had absolutely no competition of note. But that same year Atlas Comics was branded Marvel and its editor Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby released a new comic called The Fantastic Four. Within a decade Marvel had displaced DC as the biggest comics company in the US and snatched away a lot of talent and critical acclaim that had gone to DC. DC fought back, starting formidable Superman and Batman movie franchises and releasing a series of artistic, critically-acclaimed comic books in the 1980s and 1990s from the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. But in the early 2000s Marvel finally entered the movie scene in force with X-Men and Spider-Man, and never looked back.

This non-fiction book looks into the 50-year competition between DC and Marvel, the two titans of comic book publishing. Reed Tucker has exhaustively interviewed many key players involved and scoured the archives for interviews with those who are no longer with us. The result is a potential interesting book that examines the corporate battle between the venerable establishment figure and the plucky upstart newbie.

Or at least it's a potentially interesting book that tries to do that. The opening chapters expand on this, detailing how Stan Lee took over a moribund company and injected some 1960s inventiveness, irreverence and character development to win over young fans from the older, more moribund publisher. We're told that Marvel focused more on the characters' internal lives, on the distrust with which they are treated by the government (helping young readers identify with similarly confused and mistrusted characters) and gave their writers and artists much greater freedom to express themselves, throwing away the style guides DC saddled their readers with. Marvel also used real locations, particularly in and around New York, which excited readers more than stories set in completely fictional locales like Gotham and Metropolis.

All of this stuff is great, but Reed never really moves on from this basic assumption: Marvel was the plucky underdog with greater creative energy and freedom, and DC was the staid old man taken by surprise by what the youngster was doing and whose attempts to replicate it by "getting down with the kids" were embarrassing. That applies very well to the 1960s and the early 1970s. However, some of Reed's conclusions and anecdotage are questionable: he challenges the wisdom of DC poaching Jack Kirby from Marvel and putting them on the Jimmy Olsen comic book, but this was both Kirby's own choice (so he wouldn't cost anyone a job on another comic, as the Jimmy Olsen book didn't have a permanent artist at the time) and also allowed him to set up his own, more original books later on by introducing characters like Darkseid.

By the time the 1980s have rolled around, Reed is still expanding on Marvel being the plucky underdog beating the boring old figure of DC, but seems to contradict himself by then talking about DC's artistic achievements with books like Swamp Thing, Watchmen and Sandman, as well as how Marvel had become the biggest-selling comic book company, making DC the underdogs. Aware that this is getting repetitive, he switches to studying the film business and how DC got some great movies made whilst Marvel flirted with moderately successful TV shows but otherwise couldn't get a decent movie on screen until twenty-two years later. This is interesting, with some great stories of bizarre behind-the-scenes battles and the film companies not "getting" comic books at all, but again it lacks depth.

The book is ultimately a bit constrained by its premise, and it's to Tucker's credit that he remains laser-focused on the interrelationship between Marvel and DC. It would have been very easy to get sidetracked in the internal history of the two companies and discuss more creative decisions, but Tucker stays on point throughout. This does mean the book veers towards the more corporate side of things rather than the creative one, which I think will be of less interest to those keen to learn more about the origins of superhero characters or how the books developed. But it has some value: this is an under-told aspect of the comic book story and Tucker keeps the story ticking over nicely.

Slugfest (***½) is a readable and intriguing book about the titanic competition between the two biggest comic book companies in the United States. It's also a bit on the repetitive side, with not as much depth as perhaps might be wished, and a lack of information on the creative choices as opposed to business ones. It's still a good story, well-told and interesting, but one for hardcore comic book fans only. The book is available now in the UK and USA.

Patrick Stewart officially retires as Professor X

Patrick Stewart has announced that, at the age of 76, he has retired from playing the character of Professor Charles Xavier in 20th Century Fox's X-Men series of films.

Stewart debuted in the role of Professor X in the movie X-Men (2000). He reprised the role in X2 (2003), The Last Stand (2006) and Days of Future Past (2014), as well as brief appearances in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and The Wolverine (2013). His final role as Professor X comes in Logan (2017), which also marks the final appearance of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine (although Jackman hasn't completely ruled out a comedic cameo in a future Deadpool movie, given his online banter with Ryan Reynolds).

Stewart's decision to leave the role is unsurprising. Given the events of X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and the ongoing rewriting of the X-Men film continuity over the last few films, as well as Jackman's decision to retire, it's clear that Fox will taking future X-Men films in a different direction, perhaps leaning more on the new cast with James McAvoy playing the role of a somewhat younger Professor X, or even contemplating a full, from-scratch reboot after twenty years of the current, increasingly convoluted continuity.

Stewart was given the role by director Bryan Singer in 1999 following a fan campaign to have him cast in the role. It gave Stewart his second popular Hollywood role following his performance as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 to 1994 and four spin-off films: Generations (1994), First Contact (1996), Insurrection (1998) and Nemesis (2002). During the making of the X-Men films Stewart met Ian McKellan and the two distinguished actors formed a strong "bromance" that has continued ever since (with McKellan officiating at Stewart's wedding).

Although Stewart has departed the role of Professor X, he will continue working as an actor on screen, on stage and in voiceover work. His next role will be as, er, Poop in the animated Emoji Movie.

Deadpool

Wade Wilson is a smart-talking mercenary who takes a lot of small-time jobs warning off stalkers and helping people (for money). He meets Vanessa, the love of his life, but then discovers he has cancer. Fearing losing her, he accepts an offer from a shadowy surgeon named Ajax to grant him superpowers of healing to get rid of the cancer, in return for working for Ajax. When it turns out that Ajax is a lunatic and only gives Wilson his powers after disfiguring him for life, Wilson is "unimpressed" and seeks revenge, becoming the crime-fighting lunatic (and constant thorn in the side of the X-Men) Deadpool.

Conventional wisdom is that superhero movies are for, if not kids, then all the family. People in funny costumes running around and blowing things up? Definitely something mainly for children that adults can also enjoy. That assumption has driven the marketing and budgets of almost every superhero movie since the original Superman in 1978, but it has certainly been the dominant market stance since Iron Man in 2008. The occasional attempt to make a superhero movie for adults like Watchmen and Kick-Ass, complete with swearing and more graphic violence, has met with relative financial failure. If you have an adult-oriented comic and want to see it faithfully on screen, your only bet has been to get it on TV instead (the route chosen by Preacher and The Walking Dead).

Ryan Reynolds doesn't do conventional wisdom. A long-time fan of the Marvel Comics character Deadpool, he finally got to play the role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. After an extended cameo, the character had his mouth sewn up and turned into a lobotomised bad guy. Reynolds wasn't impressed and neither were the fans. So began a seven-year campaign to get the character on screen, taking in multiple script runs, test footage, leaked test footage, last-minute budget cuts and a genius marketing campaign. Finally Reynolds and comic fans everywhere have had their patience and faith rewarded: Deadpool got rave reviews and took just under $300 million in its first five days on release. The R-rated action movie may have just had the shot in the arm it needs.

Deadpool is a gloriously demented, funny action move about a dude who gets disfigured for life by a British villain and then spends ages trying to get revenge, only for it to be upset by the X-Men (well, two of them). He then spends a bit more time trying to get revenge, the bad guy kidnaps his girlfriend because reasons and there's a big showdown on a beached aircraft carrier. The stakes are surprisingly low, the action fast and brutal and the one-liners never stop coming. Deadpool is a very, very good action film and superhero movie as well as a satire on the genre. This is what helps make it successful.

The other thing is timing. Watchmen isn't a terrible movie, but its heavy, metafictional commentary on superhero movie tropes didn't resonate very well in 2009 when the superhero movie genre was still in a relatively early stage (there'd been loads of them, but it wasn't until the Marvel Cinematic Universe took off that it became all-encompassing). In 2016, with a new superhero movie coming out every five minutes, Deadpool's fourth-wall shattering commentary on the genre works a lot better. Plus Deadpool is genuinely funny, the result of a tremendous script and some excellent ad-libbing from the cast.

The cast are phenomenal. This is the role that Ryan Reynolds was born to play and his delivery of hilarious, foul lines is perfect. More importantly, he can also sell scenes of anger and emotional distress. His Wade Wilson is a flawed human being, not just a delivery mechanism for dick jokes. TJ Miller is equally hilarious as his friend/barkeeper/confidante Weasel, whose ad-libbed responses to Wilson's new appearance may form the best part of the film. Ed Skrein doesn't have a lot to do as villain Ajax, lacking any kind of backstory or motivation, but then that's kind of the point. Stefan Kapičić turns in a great vocal performance as Colossus, whose role in this movie is to try to make Deadpool become a hero (mainly by boring him with unnecessarily long speeches), and Brianna Hildebrand brings the requisite teenage moodiness as Negasonic Teenage Warhead. Particularly well-cast is the Tony Award-winning, Emmy-nominated actress Leslie Uggams (noted for many prestigious film and stage roles in the 1960s and 1970s) as Blind Al, Deadpool's somewhat reluctant housemate. One performer who starts out brilliantly but then drops off (due to the script, not her) is Morena Baccarin (Firefly, Gotham, Homeland). Baccarin plays against type as a foul-mouthed escort who matches Wilson's verbal quippage and wins his heart, but ends the film reduced to a damsel in distress (a line lampshading this in the trailers is, slightly oddly, removed in the film), which is a bit disappointing.

What helps the film is its short running time, its focus on a relatively straightforward story and the clarity of the stakes. Alongside last year's Mad Max: Fury Road and Ant-Man, it certainly makes another argument for action movies where the scale is more personal and the fate of the whole world is not at stake. It is certainly a vast improvement over the leaden and overblown pomp of films like Age of Ultron and Man of Steel.

Deadpool (****½) is fast-paced, well-written and tremendously well-characterised. It's a funny movie but doesn't rely on just being funny, remembering to bring heart, satire and thunderous action as well. It is, in a rather bizarre way, charming under all the filthy one-liners and sexual references. It is on general release right now, and a sequel has already been greenlit.

Trailer for X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

A trailer has been released for Days of Future Past, the next X-Men film. This film will combine the original cast of the 2000-2006 trilogy of films with the cast of First Class, playing their younger selves. Time travel will be used to bring the two groups together to face off against a greater threat.

Returning are Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy as Professor Xavier and Ian McKellan and Michael Fassbender as Magneto. Hugh Jackman also returns as Wolverine (thanks to his immortality, they only need the one actor). Anna Pacquin, Ellen Page, Nicholas Hoult, Jennifer Lawrence and Shawn Ashmore also return as Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Beast, Mystique and Iceman respectively. Peter Dinklage (Tyrion from Game of Thrones) is the film's most notable newcomer, playing Professor Bolivar Trask. The Sentinels will play a role in the film as well. Bryan Singer, the director of X-Men and X2, returns to direct. The movie is loosely based on the highly-regarded graphic novel of the same name.

The film will be released on 23 May 2014.

X-Men: First Class

Here's a knotty problem for a studio to face. What happens when you decide to make a fourth film in one of your biggest franchises, but without any of the three major actors who made the first three films so watchable (particularly when your third movie was a bit of a dog and only saved by their performances)? The decision to make X-Men: First Class as a prequel to the existing movies that was fully open to newcomers was a canny one, allowing 20th Century Fox to effectively reboot the series without throwing away the continuity of the previous films, but the side-effect of losing Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen must have caused some consternation in the office. However, by bringing in director Matthew Vaughn, hot off the acclaimed Kick-Ass, and casting James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender as the younger Stewart and McKellen, the studio showed some good judgement (which they could have done with on the third movie).


First Class is set in 1962, roughly forty years before the events of the existing movie trilogy. Fassbender's Lehnsherr, a survivor of the concentration camps (the memorable first scene of X-Men is cleverly recreated and expanded on in the opening of First Class), is scouring the world for Nazi criminals and in particular Klaus Schmidt, the Nazi scientist who experimented on him to find a use for his mutation. Schmidt turns out to be a mutant himself, now going by the name Sebastian Shaw (a strong performance by Kevin Bacon), who has attracted the enmity of the CIA and their new mutant consultant Charles Xavier (McAvoy) by orchestrating the rising tensions between the USA and USSR. Lehnsherr agrees to join Xavier's team of 'X-Men' to help stop Shaw's plans, but in the process finds himself questioning whether mutants and humans can ever live together peacefully. Caught in the middle is Xavier's adopted shapeshifting sister, Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) who is conflicted over whether she wants to be 'normal' or be true to her mutant nature.

The inner conflict within the primary characters gives the movie an unusual depth of character for a superhero flick and is true to the themes of tolerance and identity Bryan Singer raised in the first two movies in the series (and handled somewhat more ham-fistedly by Brett Ratner in the third). It also gives us the strongest scene in the movie, as the vengeance-obsessed Lehnsherr confronts two former Nazis in a bar in Argentina in a scene that Tarantino at his best would have been proud of (and the presence of Fassbender speaking German to Nazis in this scene gives viewers of Inglorious Basterds a sense of deja vu). Fassbender's performance throughout is excellent, and he has a great rapport with McAvoy which sells you completely these are the same people as Stewart and McKellen, just younger. That said, the later movies indicated that they were friends and allies for much longer than the few weeks this movie suggests was the case.

Elsewhere McAvoy plays the young Charles Xavier to perfection, respecting Stewart's performance but bringing youthful, idealism and a spark of mischief to the character that makes him sympathetic, even when he is appearing to be naive. Scenes where Xavier has to overcome the wearying cynicism of his team-mates are given weight by McAvoy making it clear that Xavier knows that his attempts to forge peace may be doomed, but the attempt must be made anyway. Lawrence's performance is solid, but her conflicted journey is not as handled as well as it could be, with her decision on what side to join not being sold completely successfully (and there are some continuity issues based on her character's behaviour in the first three films, though nothing too bad).

The film is well-paced, with a solid use of the old standbys of montages, voice-overs and exposition used to effectively a complicated storyline involving a relatively large cast of characters. A slight failure is the depiction of the bad guys: whilst Bacon's Shaw and January Jone's Emma Frost get plenty of screen-time and dialogue, Riptide and Azazel have little to do and nothing to say, and come across as flat as a result.

Elsewhere, the film has effective and impressive action sequences, a rather clever use of real history (though somewhat altered from our own) to enhance the narrative and some nice uses of 1960s imagery and visuals (particularly in the credits sequence). The action sequences are earned by good performances, strong direction and an enjoyable script that is a bit more complex and interesting than many superhero films. There's also a rather cool easter egg for fans of the other movies to watch out for.

X-Men: First Class (****) could have been a potential mess, but it emerges as the second-best movie in the franchise to date (after the splendid X2) and one of the best reboots of a superhero franchise to date. The move is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray)