The decline in the audience response to Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies has led the franchise to stumble drastically. Given that Marvel Studios has continued to disappoint fans with their projects, many are slowly losing interest in their content to a great extent.
However, their downfall was something Superman icon, Christopher Reeve predicted years ago. Reeve’s past interview has been making rounds for a while which clearly explained where Marvel went wrong.
Christopher Reeve Got Candid About ‘Sequelitis’ Disease in Hollywood
Back in 1988, Christopher Reeve gave an insight into what Hollywood had been doing for years after a movie ended up performing critically and commercially well. In an old interview from SuperArchive, he shared,
“Hollywood suffers from a very bad disease called Sequelitis in which what the majors do is you take what grossed a hundred million domestically last year and get the key ingredients back again and try to pump it up a few more times.”
While they continue to make a sequel, it heavily affects its quality. He continued,
“Of course, the quality is a sliding scale of diminishing returns. And I think very rarely do you get a sequel that’s an improvement on what went before it.”
He further commented on the topic by stating his own experience of working in a movie. He added,
“Because often what they’ll do, and I know this happened in the case of a film that I worked on is they will make all the promises above the line. They’ll get the heavyweights, the top Actors, and the Director and whatever. And they’ll say, it’s going to be wonderful. We’re really going to go back to the original. It’s just going to be great, but then they don’t give you the resources, they don’t give you the, the tools to go and work with below the line.”
He further commented that the compromise in quality eventually affects the audience who would rather “stay at home and watch TV” than pay $7 for a movie instead. While the actor did not address the franchise directly, his comments on Hollywood’s treatment of sequelitis stand quite true for Marvel projects as they have kept on repeating the mistake.
Marvel Has Continued to Follow ‘Sequelitis’ Mistake
Also Read: “This is our new man”: John Wayne Put Christopher Reeve On The Spot Before Superman Fame
While Marvel Studios gained immense success with the launch of the Iron Man franchise, it started to implement the same for each superhero movie. Given that the MCU is a house of many fan-favorite superheroes, many wanted to explore their individual arc but somehow they ended up compromising the quality. Continuing a character’s story without much plot not only degraded the content’s quality but affected the superhero character’s popularity in general. Take the example of Thor: Love and Thunder, which became a low-end disappointment for Marvel. It couldn’t live up to fans’ expectations which heightened after the success of Thor: Ragnarok.
Even Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania utterly flopped despite it being a kickstarter of MCU’s Phase 5. That movie not only wasted the potential of an ensemble cast but also squashed fans’ excitement for future projects. To no one’s surprise, Brie Larson’s The Marvels underperformed at the box office, receiving a mixed critical response.
Not just Marvel, DC Studios is not exempt from this disease, which almost gave a similar response. Nonetheless, fans are fortunately still hopeful for quality projects that Hollywood still has to offer.
