Recently, the trailer for Avengers: Doomsday came out, and it felt… well, it felt exactly like it is: desperate and clutching for relevance by harkening back to Marvel’s glory days. Doomsday is the 39th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it comes at an all time low for the franchise where interest has never been lesser. Every film made by Marvel last year underperformed at the box office, with maybe the exception of Fantastic Four: The First Steps…which only escaped that fate due to cross media promotions and product placement, according to rumors. And the response to everything put out in the universe of late has also been just as tepid. These aren’t masterpieces that have undersold in spite of their quality; these are middling to ok films and shows that have coasted on the likability of their actors or fanbases behind their characters. The only exception to this has been Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is not due to faith in the Marvel brand being higher than Spider-Man being the most popular character on earth at the moment (Which I am planning on reviewing for the blog despite my reservations about this version of the character). So at this all time low, what is Marvel doing to renew our faith and bring us back into the fold? Well, as it turns out: making the safest possible decisions and banking HEAVILY on nostalgia.

The biggest success post-Avengers: Endgame for the company has been Deadpool & Wolverine, which, while fun, also heavily relied on fans’ nostalgia for a bygone era of the brand. Bringing back Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, Dafne Keen’s X-23, Wesley Snipes’s Blade, and more to really hit fans in the nostalgia bone. While this approach was somewhat novel at the time (emphasis on somewhat), bringing this back for the biggest film ever made and the culmination of the last seven years of Marvel movies feels cheap, and honestly like they’re just begging us to come back. It’s like an ex trying to remind you of all the good times you shared after you broke up. It’s too little too late now; we’ve all moved on.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just one or two cameos calling for our attention. Instead, they are pulling out every card they could possibly think of to get us in the theater. You liked the Infinity Saga? Guys, guess what? The directors behind Infinity War and Endgame are back; Thor’s back! Robert Downey Jr. is playing the villain! And Steve Rogers is back too, and he’s wielding Thor’s hammer! Wasn’t that cool in Endgame? That was so cool in Endgame. You liked the Fox X-Men movies? Well, guess what? They’re back too! Well, some of them, and we also have Channing Tatum’s Gambit here. Remember when he almost played that character in a movie? And they’re all wearing comic-accurate costumes; didn’t you want that? Look, we also got Doctor Doom and the Fantastic Four here too! And so on, and so on. 

Do you notice something from this? All of this relies on characters the last seven years of films have not built up. Sure, some of them are here but can anyone really say they’re excited to see Shang-Chi or the new Falcon again? How many people even knew there was a new Falcon? The MCU has done such a poor job establishing new characters and making audiences care about them post Endgame that they have to rely on the previous hits of older generations to get butts in seats. No one really is excited to see many of the new characters introduced, and that’s no one’s fault but the studio’s. Instead of recognizing that Endgame was the end of an era and it was time to try new things, they instead constantly relied on age-old formulas and the burgeoning streaming market to get new stories and characters out there. Stretching out already tired concepts by the 2020s into 8 episode streaming shows set such a bad precedent, it made everything feel weaker. The novelty of seeing a new Marvel movie every year faded as there were 3 a year and then 3 streaming shows in the same year. It started to get overcrowded and all these projects got rushed out leaving glaring issues in their structures and characters. 

It seems like Marvel was really depending on the likability of their actors to carry them through this new era rather than crafting stories we wanted to see. It makes sense; a lot of the characters chosen for adaptation post-Endgame weren't super popular and didn’t have as many comics to draw from as Iron Man, Captain America, or Thor. The Eternals, Shang-Chi, Moon Knight, Kate Bishop, Agatha Harkness, and more were all big bets, but unfortunately none of them really landed with more than a passing interest. Add on top of that a lack of a plan for when we would see these characters again, and it was hard to develop an interest. I don’t really like business speak when discussing art, so this isn’t me saying “oh we needed to strengthen the Shang-Chi brand so we could get more audiences engaged with Shang-Chi content”; I say this more as a fan of some of these characters. I grew up reading a lot of Moon Knight comics and was very excited to see an adaptation of him on screen. I was ultimately left super disappointed with the mythical Indiana Jones-inspired adventure we got on Disney+ instead of a dark crime thriller with supernatural elements. There was no plan to bring back this character after his one-season show, so there was no chance to win me back. I don’t view Moon Knight as a lost cause; I still think they could make it up to me and make a Moon Knight thing I do like. He’s still a great character with a lot of opportunity on screen. But he’s not even back in Doomsday, so he doesn’t even have any fun supporting appearances to see if I like him more in an ensemble piece. And that’s just one character; that’s not even to mention the others that haven’t had a chance to shine either. As it stands, the only character I even have a remote interest in from the last phase of the MCU is…Yelena Belova of all characters. She’s cool, I like her, but she’s not exactly a favorite.

Everything just reeks of desperation; it’s like Kevin Feige and co agree with me on this and, as such, chose to focus on the characters they developed almost a decade ago and characters they inherited through shady business instead. Don’t worry that you don’t like everything we put out recently… just look, we got Cyclops back! That’s good enough, right? Right?