Star Wars is responsible for Marvel’s biggest problem

By Chris Snellgrove | Published 5 days ago

There have been countless think pieces and social media posts about what has caused the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the most common complaints boils down to how many shows and movies feel like homework. Disney seems to expect fans to absorb all the ancillary media to simply understand their latest releases. Most of the time, this doesn’t tell a complete story because newer content spends too much time setting up what comes next. It’s a frustrating approach to blockbuster storytelling, and we can pretty squarely blame George Lucas and his approach to the Star Wars prequels 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 when The Phantom Menace came out almost a decade earlier iron man Did you bring the MCU to life? The answer begins with Darth Maul, a new assassin character who, despite his incredible design and instant popularity, only had three lines of dialogue. The public understandably had a lot of questions about his origins and motivations and were invariably told that they had to read various books and comics to piece together what this guy’s problem was.

For the Star Wars prequels, that became a persistent problem, one that Disney would replicate with Marvel after purchasing the franchise set in a galaxy far, far away. You had to read outside media to learn crucial knowledge about other villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous, and reading books and comics was also the only way to learn more about equally crucial relationships, like the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker. and the marriage between Padmé Amidala and the future Darth Vader. Frankly, it was incredibly lazy storytelling based on the assumption that hungry fans wouldn’t mind the expensive and time-consuming task of reading more.

Marvel has its own task

Now, Disney has bought Star Wars, meaning it’s owned by the same monolithic studio that owns Marvel. Unsurprisingly, Disney has replicated the prequel’s problem of assigning tasks to the audience, hoping that you’ll delve into outside media to explain major plot details, such as the rise of the First Order, the fall of Kylo Ren to the Dark Side and why the Resistance is separate from the government they work to protect. What’s surprising, however, is that Disney began taking this approach of making fans do their homework with their other blockbuster IP.

With the launch of Disney+, the Mouse House adopted a variant (so to speak) of the homework strategy. Instead of encouraging fans to use the main books and comics to fully understand the new movies, they wanted fans to watch Disney+ shows. Now you have to look WandaVision understand both Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Agatha all the time. you have to look Loki to understand who is the big bad Quantum It is, just as you have to look Ms. Marvel to understand who the hell this new character is the wonders is.

The irony is that fans acted as if this was some annoying new narrative decision by Disney, but the reality is that they simply applied George Lucas’ annoying homework strategy to Marvel. Honestly, they had every reason to hope this strategy would work… as frustrating as those prequels were, fans really flocked to stores to buy ancillary media and fully understand these new movies set in a galaxy far, far away. . But that was because we hadn’t had any new Star Wars movie content since Return of the Jedi in 1983; That strategy didn’t work for Marvel because Disney released too many things too soon, effectively creating the superhero fatigue that now threatens their bottom line.

There you have it, folks: If fans of either franchise want to admit it, Star Wars inadvertently helped create Marvel’s biggest problem. And considering the only way to fix it is for Disney to focus less on profits and more on telling great stories, that problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Soon, the MCU as a whole could look a little like Logan’s skeletal body: a nice corpse that Deadpool can play with whenever Disney needs a sure-fire blockbuster.