So, how did we get here?
The MCU fell from grace the way Hemingway’s Mike Campbell went bankrupt, slowly and then all at once.
I think we all felt it, didn’t we? At some point this year, probably in the summer when Barbenheimer was in full swing, there was a moment when all of us who had still not disembarked from the hype train took a look at the MCU and said “nah, I’m done”.
And you probably have your own explanation for why that is. Endgame was the peak and it’s all been downhill since then. Superhero fatigue. Bad writing. Too woke. Not woke enough. Too much CGI. Martin Scorsese dropping truth bombs. The pandemic. Whatever.
But ultimately, I think the real reason was just…time. The studio execs currently running around trying to figure out why audiences aren’t flocking to their superhero movies anymore are like surfers wondering why the tidal wave they were riding faded away into the ocean.
Guys. It was a wave. That’s what they do.
Granted, it was a wave like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Depending on when you consider the modern age of superhero movies to have begun (the first X-Men movie maybe?) we’ve been riding this wave for over twenty years with some of the biggest box-office numbers of all time. But, it really was just a bigger version of every other Hollywood trend, be that “make everything like the Matrix” or “make everything like Transformers” or (if you want to go old school) “make everything a Western”. And trends never last. That’s why they’re called “trends”.
And I’ve been burned enough times before to know not to make any big predictions. Maybe these last two years were just a brief blip in an unbroken streak of cinematic dominance that will stretch on to the death of the universe. But, right now, in the waning hours of 2023 it sure feels like the MCU is done. And I’m okay with that. And I don’t regret my time with it as long as I can pretend Thor 4 doesn’t exist.
Because, even if we got nothing else of value from this series of films, James Gunn got to make the Guardians trilogy, and I wouldn’t deny him that for the world.
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