The Marvel Cinematic Universe was a resilient trend in blockbuster cinema. Most fads run their course long before they celebrate a ten-year anniversary. Despite the endless calls to put the capes aside, Marvel will ride the superhero craze until the wheels fall off. It’s an unusual boom, given that superhero movies have been popular for decades. Still, the Marvel Cinematic Universe demonstrates the rise and fall of a trend pushed to its limits. Can Deadpool & Wolverine bring back excitement for the genre and the classic blockbuster schedule?
Disney’s ongoing strategy to continue selling risk-averse entertainment to undiscerning crowds has been to regurgitate the things they already love again and again. Their bolder technique is to continue acquiring new licenses, brands, and intellectual property to ensure things stay interesting. Fans can’t get bored with their toys if they get new ones every so often. Deadpool & Wolverine represents the grand entrance of Disney’s latest acquisition, but it comes with a massive dose of goodwill.
Summer Blockbusters are Struggling
The modern summer blockbuster will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws popularized the format with a massive event film. Of course, Jaws dropped in the summer because it fit the theme. Two years later, Star Wars topped Jaws‘ substantial box office return, cementing the suitable release date. The 80s packed two or three gigantic genre films into every summer, creating many of the franchises that remain iconic today. The 1990s saw many of these science fiction and fantasy projects replaced with slightly more grounded action films, like Speed, Twister, and The Fugitive. These summer blockbusters had no assigned genre. Romance, comedy, horror, sci-fi, war, westerns, historical drama, and everything in between claimed the summer blockbuster crown. Unfortunately, the late 1990s and early 2000s picked a winner and gradually eliminated every other competitor.
Superhero movies have been integral to entertainment since the 1940s. Film serials kept Superman and Batman in the hearts of fans before they became popular on TV. The 70s and 80s saw classic costumed crime fighters sharing cinema space with everything from Grease to Indiana Jones. By the 2000s, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogies demonstrated the potential of superhero film series. Of course, everything changed with Iron Man and the resulting MCU. Their dominance guaranteed one or two box-office hits from the same studio every year. 2023 proved to be the downfall of this promise.
Marvel has seen a staggering decline since Endgame, but other major franchises are falling even faster. Summer franchises like the Fast Saga,Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One became their franchise’s weakest performers. The Flash was a historic flop for the superhero genre, leading DC to return to the woodshed to rework their universe. This Memorial Day saw the weakest box office performance since the 90s. Summer movies have to try something new, lest the paradigm fall into disuse.
Deadpool & Wolverine Might Change the Conversation
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Director |
Shawn Levy |
|---|---|
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Writers |
Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Shawn Levy |
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Stars |
Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin |
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Release Date |
July 26, 2024 |
The main difference in impact between the current and previous summer blockbusters is excitement. Every Marvel movie makes a ton of money, but they don’t all become massive events. The last few years have seen Marvel struggle in that department. Marvel wisely skipped 2020, but they’ve pumped out a summer movie every year since. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 premiered last May to impressive critical praise but a slightly less impressive box-office take than its predecessor. Marvel dropped Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder in the summer of 2022. Both films made money, but they represented declines after Endgame, especially given the fact that Multiverse of Madness cost only $5 million less to make.
Deadpool & Wolverine has the potential to become a powerful mainstream event. Barbenheimer eclipsed Marvel last year, but Deadpool & Wolverine can bring excited viewers back to the franchise. Barbenheimer fever really was the shakeup fans were looking for. Studios didn’t engineer that event. Movies with wildly different tones and presentations drop on the same day all the time. Furiosa dropped alongside The Garfield Movie, but no one tried to get GarFuriosa going. Fans have been building their own summer movie events. Maybe Deadpool & Wolverine will finally offer something appealing enough to drive that kind of Star Wars-level thrill to the theater again.
Pre-sales for Deadpool & Wolverine have created a ton of faith in a renewed Marvel Cinematic Universe. Projects like Thor: Love and Thunder crushed goodwill among fans, but Deadpool & Wolverine can reawaken that positive association. The awful truth is that movies are suffering because people are suffering. No one has the money to take their family to a fun day at the movies without the guarantee of something they’re going to love. Like the studios, audiences are becoming too risk-averse to let anything new flourish. Marvel has disappointed fans repeatedly, slowly killing their trust in the franchise. Deadpool & Wolverine can combine excitement with quality, just as Jaws and Star Wars did in the 70s.
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