Marvel Studios: The Autopsy
A billion-dollar brand dies not with a bang but a whimper
⚰️ The Final Nail: Fantastic Four – First Steps
The final damage from the second weekend is in: Fantastic Four: First Steps has dropped 67%, and that’s against a weak opening to begin with. The film has basically collapsed at the box office.
Back in January, many of us were saying July 2025 would be the moment of truth for superhero cinema. The third and last of the three Marvel films this year dropped—none of them great, but they were good enough after a fashion. Sort of like Black Panther (2018) in terms of quality - Acceptable as entertainment despite some notable flaws.
And once upon a time, that was enough to rake in a billion dollars. But that was the late 2010s.
📉 The Blip Broke More Than Canon
Black Panther and Captain Marvel both coasted on enormous goodwill and cultural momentum. Endgame had one decent final battle—and an incoherent time-travel plot welded onto a catastrophic lore decision: The Snap and The Blip.
Let’s recap: Thanos wipes out 50% of all life. Probably more than 50%. Half of everything that keeps civilization from falling into chaos disappears overnight. We’re talking farmers, truckers, water engineers, IT admins, moms, and municipal clerks. The global food chain collapses. Civilization dies gasping.
Then five years go by. That’s enough time for society to reshape around that trauma. Wills have been settled. Homes abandoned or occupied. Markets rebuilt. Governments crumbled — then reorganized. And then, poof, everyone’s back.
Let’s look at one story.
Medium Karl had the day off when the Snap happened. He was teaching his daughter Emma how to play Chess when they both vanished. One moment they are suddenly swaying dizzy, the next they find themselves on the floor. Then he hears the ratchet sound of a Mossberg 590 being fed a shell, he also hears a demand, “Who the fuck are you and why are you in my house?”
Medium Karl looks around confused. It’s his house, but most of his stuff is gone. He’s ordered out of his own home, but he can’t argue with a shotgun. He hears screaming from next door, it’s Carrol From Next Door being physically thrown out of her house her along with her son, Kevin.
Fast forwarding quite a bit. Medium Karl eventually finds his wife Janet living on a farm. She’s been married to Bob from next door for about four years. She’s had two kids with Bob and has one more on the way. Karl’s son Ethan was still in diapers when the snap happened; he’s six now and doesn’t remember him at all. The only father he’s ever known is Bob. Janet sobs, “I’m sorry,” but shuts the door in his face. She had to make a choice, and Bob has a farm. They had agreed to take in Emma.
Medium Karl has lost literally everything in his life. And he’s now facing a world that has been producing only enough of the food it needs to keep 50% of its new population alive.
That’s compelling drama. That’s your prestige HBO-style miniseries right there. But Marvel never bothered. Instead, they filmed without a finished script and made it up as they went along. As usual.
🎭 Mantles and Misfires
After Endgame, Marvel lost Iron Man and Captain America—and that should have been okay. Expensive stars, ten-year contracts, natural endpoints. But something else was happening behind the scenes.
Disney hates paying outsiders for IP. They’d much rather push in-house characters, no matter how unpopular. Enter Victoria Alonso and her now-infamous “Mantle Theory”: the belief that audiences didn’t love characters, they loved roles. Replace Steve Rogers with anyone and the fans would follow. Spoiler Alert: they didn’t.
This idea failed every single time it was tried in the comics. But it told Mickey the Great and Terrible exactly what he wanted to hear. Sure, this seems like a terrible idea to somebody outside the Disney company, but that’s only because it is. However, if you were working in that mirror maze of corporate passive aggression called the Walt Disney Company, it would seem like a really great idea – to keep your mouth shut! 2020 was the plague year. Bob Iger retires, except now he’s back, there’s a civil war at the top of the company, it is clearly and obviously a time to keep your head as low as possible. The SJWs at Disney were absolutely in the saddle. Iger was using them to strengthen his position, and Bob Chapek had no idea how to stop it. Victoria Alonso appeared to be running wild at Marvel Studios.
The result? A years-long parade of content nobody asked for.
📺 The Streaming Spiral
The first car attached to the fail train was Falcon and Winter Soldier—the first of the “Understudy Avengers” shows. These were the — wholly owned by Disney —race and gender swapped IP characters. Sure, people who didn’t like comics thought it was great and all, even if they would never consider reading them, but people who did read them stopped.
It wasn’t just the Wokism parade — it was also really weak storytelling. Marvel knew how to make movies. Making TV is a different skillset and they didn’t have it. Consequently, they would take a movie idea and stuff five hours of filler between the beginning and ending and call it a series.
Loki and Hawkeye came next that year. Both of them, bait and switch titles. The title character spent most of the show going on at length about how truly awesome, inspiring, and amazing his pissed off female replacement was. They tanked in streaming
Even Ms. Marvel, which had genuine heart and a standout lead in Iman Vellani, couldn’t draw eyeballs. Nobody cared. Black Widow and Shang-Chi bombed too, though COVID and same-day streaming gave Disney a temporary excuse.
But by November 2021, there were no more excuses.
🎬 The Theatrical Collapse
Eternals was Marvel’s first unambiguous bomb since Elektra (2005). And then came Spider-Man: No Way Home, which grossed nearly $2 billion — proving the audience was still there if the content was worth showing up for.
In 2022, Doctor Strange and Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Wakanda Forever all seriously underperformed against expectations. It was becoming clear that the Girl-Boss movie was box office poison, and Victoria Alonso’s Mantle Theory was up there with the Theory of Bloodletting for Humoral Balance.
Speaking of bloodletting, the next film resting its neck on the box office guillotine was Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This was another unambiguous bomb; it didn’t even crack $500 million. After that disaster, someone very senior and highly visible needed to take the blame. Victoria Alonso’s head was thrown from the balcony to appease the stockholders.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 broke even. Barely. But Chris Pratt wouldn’t re-enlist without James Gunn—who was already setting up shop at DC. It was a Pyrrhic victory.
Then came the worst disaster in Marvel history: The Marvels. A barely coherent Frankensteined-together product of the MCU in panicked scramble mode. This cinematic golem shambled out of theaters with a catastrophic $200 million box office haul against a budget larger than some countries’ GDPs; it limped out of pop culture to die miserable, alone, and forsaken of all.
🔥 The One Feige Didn’t Touch
And then... Deadpool & Wolverine. The unthinkable happened. A $1 billion+ hit—without Kevin Feige’s fingerprints on it.
Everyone knew he’d tried to sabotage it. But someone greenlit Wolverine to smoke onscreen—a big no-no at Disney. And there’s exactly one man in the company with the power to override that rule: Bob Iger. It was clearly made under his personal protection.
📉 The Billion-Dollar Year (But Not in a Good Way)
On the TV side, Disney has adopted a “dump it and run” strategy. Echo, Secret Invasion, She-Hulk, Agatha, and Ironheart were launched with minimal marketing and maximum embarrassment. Ironheart was shelved for nearly three years before being thrown under the bus during Superman’s ad campaign.
As of today, Marvel has released three movies in 2025, and they’ve brought in a combined total of just over $1 billion.
Compare that to 2019, when Marvel released three films and made $5 billion.
🪦 Final Diagnosis: Death by Hubris
Marvel’s collapse didn’t come from one bad decision—it came from a thousand avoidable ones. They forgot why people loved these stories in the first place. It wasn’t just about capes and powers. It was about heroes—characters worth following, arcs worth watching, and legends worth believing in.
Kevin Feige promised us a universe. What we got was a spreadsheet. The soul’s gone. The fans noticed. And they’re not coming back for mantles, cameos, or multiverse tricks.
Marvel doesn’t need a reboot. It needs a resurrection.
It’s not going to get one.
Discuss in the comments below
Disney (Disney, Marvel, LucasFilm, Fox, and whatever Disney now owns) has a disease known as representation. They are working under the flawed premise that people want to see themselves on the screen. I'm sorry, I don't want to see myself on the screen. I want to see a flawlessly executed Superman, Batman, Dr Who, Captain Pike, Captain Kirk, Thanos, Thor, etc. I don't want to see race and sex swapped characters, I want to see loyalty to the source material.
I want coherant story lines and for the story to make sense.
In retrospect even before Endgame many of the movies were mediocre. But they were all part of a larger wave and so they rode that momentum to massive profits. Once the story ended they should have actually ended it. Endgame should have been the end. Take a few years off, then come back.