New Report Explains Why The MCU Has Mostly Fizzled Since ‘Endgame’

Thunderbolts is currently on pace to be a big win for Marvel, its best critic scores in years, its best audience scores close to ever, and what looks like it’s going to be a solid box office haul.

That of course, has been something of a rarity in the post-Endgame era, with perilously few exceptions. Now, a new Wall Street Journal report dives into what apparently happened here, focused around the architect of the MCU, Kevin Feige. Among the highlights:

• Feige is very much aware about how many things have missed in Phases 4 and 5 (I honestly couldn’t even tell you when they switched over) and is now trying to “course correct.” This is no doubt due to a string of high profile misses from Eternals to Thor Love and Thunder to Quantumania to The Marvels to some of the Disney Plus series like the comically expensive Secret Invasion,
• This will include a new focus on quality in a way that may have lapsed over the years. The more grounded Thunderbolts is being held up as a good example of this, and a good start. But this is of course as few months after the not-great Captain America: Brave New World, which promised to take us back to The Winter Soldier spy days (it did not). Now the pressure is on Fantastic Four to deliver, and whatever is going to happen with the odd-sounding Avengers: Doomsday.

• The universe being so connected to Feige directly meant he was spread thin and unable to give his personal feedback on projects until it was too late to make changes, when previously he may have indeed been able to steer something in a better directions, as he had many times.
• Feige was originally against the idea of doing Disney Plus shows, but eventually saw “potential” there along with the move making Disney happy as it attempted to bolster sign-ups. There have been wild swings in both quality, budget and reception, and things do not appear to have stabilized yet, despite some recent wins mainly focused on cheapter shows.

• Feige reportedly has a decade-long plan for the X-Men in place after a decade and a half of mainly focusing on The Avengers and related characters. Not to say those will all go away, but it would make sense to fully dive into these new characters it has finally gotten its hands on. Though questions are raised about what’s exactly about to happen with a bunch of FOX-era X-Men coming to Avengers: Doomsday in some multiverse party, when presumably the all over-50 actors are about to be recast with younger variants shortly after. Though it certainly seems like they want at least one to carry over, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. Jackman has not been confirmed to be appearing in Doomsday, however, despite a lot of his old X-Men cronies showing up.

The idea overall appears to be…make less stuff, but make better stuff. That seems wise, but I think we’re still in a questionable era at the moment, Thunderbolts and Daredevil: Born Again aside, and we may have to get through a bunch of mucky productions before this full reset happens. And the thing I’m worried about the most right now is Avengers Doomsday and Secret Wars.

There may be too much pressure on Feige after 15 years of this. Not to say that he should move on, but the idea to slow things down and not relentlessly launch a half dozen movies and shows a year regardless of quality is a good one. There are very big tests ahead and this may take a while to kick into gear, even if Thunderbolts has been good here (though so far not a huge earner). We may be waiting a few years for this reset to happen.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.