The Russo brothers have more than proved that they have their fingers on the pulse of pop culture. Which isn’t necessarily something we ever expected to say of two filmmakers who started their career with 2007’s You, Me, and Dupree, but there you go.
The duo have grown into two of the most successful filmmakers in cinema history, earning Marvel Studios alone a total of $6 billion across their four MCU movies to date. So when they announce that they think they know what’s really at the root of the franchise’s problems this decade, then we should probably sit up and listen as they might just have a point.
The buzzword that gets thrown around a lot to explain the MCU’s downturn is “superhero fatigue,” but when GamesRadar+ asked the Russos for their thoughts on the issue, they immediately shut it down. To them, the audience is not necessarily fatigued with superhero storytelling, but maybe they are fatigued with the way superhero storytelling is being presented to them. As Joe Russo put it:
“I think it’s a reflection of the current state of everything. It’s difficult right now, it’s an interesting time,” Russo said. “I think we’re in a transitional period and people don’t know quite yet how they’re going to receive stories moving forward, or what kinds of stories they’re going to want.”
Joe Russo believes that the younger generation, who are naturally Marvel’s main target demographic, are simply losing overall interest in theatrical cinema as a medium, which has contributed to falling ticket sales in recent years. A reminder that The Marvels was the studio’s lowest-grossing movie by some margin last November, when it only brought home $200 million worldwide (its 2019 forebear, Captain Marvel, earned five times that, don’t forget).
“There’s a big generational divide about how you consume media,” he continued. “There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s aging out. Meanwhile the new generation are ‘I want it now, I want to process it now’, then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time. You know, it’s a very different moment in time than it’s ever been. And so I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what’s at play more than anything else.”
Are the Russos right about the biggest problem facing the MCU?
Keeping up with changing content trends is definitely a hot-button issue for the Russos, seeing as they’ve made a lot of projects for Netflix and Prime Video in recent years, and they’re certainly correct that cinema as we know it is evolving. On the other hand, the pair do seem to be being rather diplomatic about the MCU’s own problems since they left it behind five years ago.
For starters, the lack of old favorites Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, and others has most definitely rocked audiences’ loyalty to the franchise, and the lack of a clear narrative or chief protagonist across the Multiverse Saga has arguably damaged the brand. Were people put off by The Marvels because it was released in a cinema, or because it was “just another Marvel movie” rather than a key chapter in the story?
Honestly, you could also argue that Avengers: Endgame was such an unattainable high both financially and narratively that there was nowhere to go but down for the MCU after that. The truth of superhero fatigue will be proven once James Gunn’s DCU gets cooking next year — if audiences lap up his new Superman movie and its sequels but continue to ignore Marvel then clearly the MCU’s problem isn’t with the genre or theaters, it’s that the Russos are no longer around to show ’em how it’s done.
