‘The Marvels’ Flop Proves Tying the MCU’s Future to Its TV Shows Was a Huge Mistake

When does $46 million look like chump change? When you’re talking about the opening weekend gross of a new movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the superhero crossover event that has consistently dominated the global box office over the past 15 years. While plenty of movies would kill to make that kind of cash out the gate, it’s a new low for the house that Tony Stark built—and a bad start for a blockbuster that cost nearly $300 million. Yes, The Marvels is the studio’s first true flop, and also the most concerning evidence yet that the once-bulletproof Marvel brand is showing serious signs of wear and tear.

Executives at Disney will surely spend the next few weeks wringing their hands about what went wrong. Was it the SAG strike? The vocally sexist fanboys complaining that their favorite toy factory went “woke,” with woke in this case meaning “three women”? The mixed-to-negative reviews that began dropping last week? Or is the failure of The Marvels just a symptom of what pundits have been identifying as “Marvel fatigue” for the last few years—the growing sense that there’s just too much cape-and-cowl fare on the market, that the supply is starting to seriously outpace the demand? In all likelihood, there isn’t one single reason that the 33rd entry in this forever franchise flamed out.

Still, there are theories, and the most persuasive acknowledge what the trailers couldn’t hide: The Marvels is a big-screen blockbuster that just about requires some small-screen homework. These days, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to watch a Marvel movie without feeling like you’ve missed something crucial—something that happened between the movies, on one of the various Disney+ shows that now tie directly into the overarching narrative of the franchise. The Marvels might be the apotheosis of this trend. It’s the first Marvel movie that functions more like a sequel to a TV show—or rather, to two TV shows, WandaVision and Ms. Marvel. That’s a new precedent of prerequisites for this franchise, and maybe a bridge too far for audiences.

Not so long ago, the chances of a Marvel movie even acknowledging events and characters from a TV show were very low. Before the launch of Disney+, the studio farmed out the small-screen adventures of its superhero portfolio. There were the Netflix shows, like Daredevil and Jessica Jones, and the ABC shows, like the short-lived Agent Carter and not-short-lived-enough Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and a few other properties of an even smaller profile. All nominally took place in the same continuity as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there was little overlap in talent, storyline, or even aesthetic.

The shows could respond to something happening in the movies. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., for example, built episodes around the aftermath of the endings of Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But what happened in the shows almost never got referenced in the movies, and it was very rare for even the second-string members of the Avengers family to drop by, say, the Netflix Hell’s Kitchen.

As a result, the shows rarely felt like they were actually taking place in the same continuity as the movies. Wouldn’t the Defenders help take on Thanos? Why didn’t anyone ever notice that Phil Coulson was still alive? They were nominally connected at best, and thus easily ignored by those who otherwise treated any MCU movie as appointment viewing. The tradeoff, of course, was that Kevin Feige protected the uniformity of his cinematic universe, rarely diluting the brand by linking it too closely to more low-budget network and streaming fare.

With the launch of Disney+ in 2019, that equation changed. Suddenly, Marvel was making its own shows, and forging a direct relationship between them and its ongoing line of reliably profitable films. The first few Marvel series made for the streamer were especially splashy continuations, headlined by stars of the movies: Watching WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, and Hawkeye, it was much easier to accept that you were seeing a new chapter of the MCU… in part because they took off from the events of the films, as opposed to telling barely related stories supposedly happening in the Marvelverse.

You could see the logic of this restructuring. Marvel movies already functioned a lot like television, and had found great success in making each installment of the franchise feel like a vital next episode—just one link in the chain leading forever towards an Infinity War. Why couldn’t that approach extend to actual television? Of course, as a recent, revealing article in Variety clarified, the shows were also part of a larger plan to create an unbroken stream of Avengers content: all Marvel all the time, with barely a month passing without some new branded storyline sucking up all the pop-culture oxygen like a black hole.

It’s one thing to allow events from the movies to flow forward into the television shows. It’s quite another to reverse that flow and expect audiences to keep current on all the limited and ongoing series wedged between the movies—stuff that requires not just ample time but also a monthly subscription fee. Over the last couple years, Marvel has flirted hard with making the Disney+ content integral to an audience’s understanding of what’s happening at the multiplex. Hoping to parse The Scarlet Witch’s motivations in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness? Better watch WandaVision. Curious about this new Big Bad in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania? The answers lie in Season 1 of Loki. Even Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, an MCU entry relatively unencumbered by larger MCU business, includes characters and relationships from a Disney+ Christmas special.

You could argue that the imperative to watch everything with the logo on it has been baked into the MCU since the start. These movies have been building stories on top of each other since, well, the original Iron Man, which teased a much bigger world than could be glimpsed in a single, only ostensibly self-contained origin story. It’s not as though the endless serialization hurt Avengers: Endgame, an all-time blockbuster smash that rewarded the completism of its target audience by functioning as an all-purpose uber-conclusion to all the parallel film series people had been watching over the years. But there’s a difference between expecting viewers to keep up with a movie series that drops a couple installments a year and asking them to keep current with 10-episode seasons of television airing at a near-monthly clip.

The idea was always to make the TV shows feel more cinematic than the typical small-screen fare, with slightly better effects and the star power of the movies. But by dragging a bunch of streaming content into the tapestry of the movie empire it worked so hard to develop over a decade-plus, Marvel has actually done the opposite: It’s taken the cinematic out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, churning 0ut movies that have started to look and feel like extended episodes of television. This is perhaps especially true of The Marvels, which is paced more like a season premiere of a show already in progress than a movie proper; it just kind of plunks the audience down into the story mid-stream, barely bothering to even reintroduce its co-headliners graduating from TV to movie duty.

And Marvel is perhaps overestimating the number of viewers who are keeping current on the TV shows—or at least gambling too much on the overlap between its ticket-buying fans and its subscribers. No offense to national treasure Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but awkwarding wedging her character, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, into the events of Black Widow and the second Black Panther movie isn’t going to inspire the same level of recognition-related dopamine release as arranging a cameo for one of the stars of your actual film franchise. Likewise, while it’s not exactly unusual for a Marvel movie to end with one of its extended-universe players walking out of the shadows for a quick round of audience applause, The Marvels really pushes the limits of that strategy by building, in its final credits scene, to an appearance by… a character who has only appeared on television up until now. It ends up playing like an advertisement: Check out Hawkeye on Disney+.

That the Marvel movies are moving to Disney+ at a quicker pace only further encourages audiences to think of them as TV, something they can wait for streaming to watch. Maybe The Marvels will earn its audience on the streaming platform, where it can more easily be slotted into a binge of Ms. Marvel. But that’s kind of a sad place for the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time to reach: more grist for the content mill, something to throw up on the TV while doing laundry or making dinner. These movies were events just a few years ago. They’re becoming more like Friends reruns with an effects budget.

Marvel has reaped the rewards of treating its vast ensemble of costumed characters like players in a giant, ongoing saga. But there’s a risk to that strategy, too. What comic-book readers and TV watchers have in common is a breaking point of interest: that moment when something you’ve been consuming by appointment for ages starts to slowly feel like less of a priority and more of an obligation. You miss an episode or an issue. You fall behind. And before you know it, the amount of time it takes to catch up has eclipsed your curiosity about where the story has gone. If Marvel isn’t careful, it could lose its audience in the same way. As any channel surfer will tell you, there’s always something else on.

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