Star Wars is responsible for Marvel's biggest problem

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 15 seconds ago

There have been countless think pieces and social media posts about what caused the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the most common complaints boils down to many shows and movies feeling like work. of home Disney seems like fans are looking at every bit of auxiliary media to understand only their latest releases. More often than not, this doesn't really tell a complete story because the newer content spends too much time establishing what comes next. It's a frustrating approach to blockbuster storytelling, and we can blame George Lucas and his approach to the Star Wars prequels pretty directly for Marvel's decline.

How Star Wars made the works for the 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 brought the MCU to life? The answer begins with Darth Maula new killer character who, despite his fantastic design and instant popularity, only had three lines of dialogue. The audience got a lot of questions about his origins and motivations and were invariably told that they had to go read different books and comics to piece together what this guy was all about.

For the Star Wars prequels, it became a persistent problem, that Disney replicate with Marvel after acquiring the franchise set in a galaxy far, far away. You had to read the media outside to learn a crucial story 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 'and the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and the marriage between Padme Amidala and the future Darth Vader. It was, frankly, insanely lazy storytelling built on the assumption that ravenous fans won't mind the expensive, time-consuming labor of extra reading.

Marvel gets their homework

Now, Disney has bought Star Wars, which means it is owned by the same monolithic studio that owns it Marvel. Unsurprisingly, Disney replicated the prequel problem of assigning audience tasks, hoping to dig into external 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 separated from the government they work to protect. What was surprising, however, is that Disney began to apply this approach of making fans do homework with their other blockbuster IP.

With the launch of Disney +, the House of Mouse has adopted a Variant (so to speak) of the strategy of the works. Instead of encouraging fans to the main books and comics to fully understand the new movies, they wanted fans to watch the Disney+ shows instead. Now, you have to watch WandaVision to understand both Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Agatha All Long. You have to watch it Loki to figure out who the Big Bad is Quantum it is, as you will see Ms. Marvel to figure out what the heck this new character is The wonders is it.

The irony is that fans acted like this was an annoying new storytelling decision from Disney, but the reality is that they were just applying the annoying strategy of George Lucas' works at Marvel. Honestly, they had every reason to expect this strategy to work … because as frustrating as those prequels were, fans really flocked to the stores to buy auxiliary media and fully understand these new films set in a galaxy far, far away. But that was because we haven't had new Star Wars movie content since Return of the Jedi in 1983; that strategy didn't work for Marvel because Disney released so much too soon, effectively creating superhero fatigue that now threatened their bottom line.

Here it is, folks: if fans of either franchise want to admit it, Star Wars inadvertently helped create Marvel's biggest problem. And considering that the only way to fix it is for Disney to focus less on profit and more on telling great stories, this problem isn't going away anytime soon. Soon, the MCU as a whole could be a bit like Logan's skeletal body: a beautiful corpse Deadpool comes to play with whenever Disney needs a surefire box-office hit.