Star Wars is responsible for Marvel’s biggest problem

Pa Chris Snellgrove
| Published 5 days ago

There have been countless speculations and posts on social media about what has caused the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the most common complaints boils down to the fact that many of the shows and movies feel like homework. Disney seems to expect fans to absorb all of the supporting media just to understand its latest releases. More often than not, it doesn’t really tell the full story because the newest content spends too much time setting up what’s coming next. It’s a disappointing approach to blockbuster storytelling, and we can blame George Lucas and his approach to the Star Wars prequels directly for Marvel’s decline.

How Star Wars did homework for fans

At this point, you’re probably asking the obvious question: How could the Star Wars prequels negatively affect the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially if A ghostly threat came out almost ten years ago Iron man brought MCU to life? The answer begins with Darth Maula stunning new character who, despite his great design and instant popularity, only had three lines of dialogue. Understandably, viewers had a lot of questions about his background and motivations, and were always told that they had to go read the various books and comics to figure out what this guy was like.

This has become an ongoing problem for the Star Wars prequels Disney would repeat with Marvel after buying a franchise set in a galaxy far, far away. You had to read outside media to learn important knowledge about other villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous, and reading books and comics was also the only way to learn more about important relationships like the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and the marriage between Padme Amidala and the future Darth Vader. Frankly, this was 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 repeated the prequel’s problem of giving viewers homework, hoping you’ll dig into third-party media to explain key plot details like the rise of the First Order, Kylo Ren’s fall to the Dark Side, and why the Resistance is separate from the government they work for to protect. What was surprising, however, was that Disney began to take this approach by forcing fans to do their homework on their other blockbuster IPs.

With the launch of Disney+, House of Mouse has adopted a variant (so to speak) of the homework strategy. Instead of encouraging fans to turn on the books and comics to fully understand the new movies, they wanted fans to watch the Disney+ shows. Now you have to watch WandaVision to understand both Doctor Strange and the multiverse of madness and Agatha all together. You must watch Loki to understand who the great evil is Quantum is, just like you should watch Ms. Marvel to figure out who this new character is Miracles there is

The irony is that fans acted like this was Disney’s annoying new storytelling decision, but really they were just applying 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 the stores to purchase the extra media and fully understand these new movies set in a galaxy far, far away. . But that’s because we haven’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 quickly, effectively causing superhero fatigue that is now threatening their bottom line.

There you have it, folks: Whether fans of either franchise want to admit it, Star Wars inadvertently helped create Marvel’s biggest problem. And considering the only way to fix this is for Disney to focus less on profits and more on telling great stories, this problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Pretty soon, the MCU as a whole might be a bit like Logan’s skeletal body: a beautiful corpse Deadpool can be played whenever Disney needs a safe box office hit.