According to recent comments by James Gunn (yes, that James Gunn), Marvel’s golden age didn’t end with Tony’s snap or Cap’s final dance. It ended in a boardroom - when Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek handed creative power to a man named Kareem Daniel, a former investment banker turned Disney executive. Daniel wasn’t a storyteller. He was in charge of Disney’s new “media and entertainment distribution” division, a fancy way of saying he controlled the flow of content. He didn’t care about arcs or character development - he cared about output. So Marvel was told to pump out as much content as possible, as fast as possible. No story? No script? No worries. Just go-go-go.
And somewhere in that frenzy, the thing that made the MCU special died.
Let’s rewind. When Iron Man came out, it was a risky move. When Guardians of the Galaxy came out, it was a risky move. When Infinity War asked us to cry over a talking tree and hate a purple CGI villain, it was still, somehow, risky. But everything after that? Safe. Bland. Rushed. Corporate.
Disney looked at the sprawling success of the Infinity Saga and thought, “Cool. Now do it again. But this time, faster. And with more shows. And tie-ins. And holiday specials. And maybe a multiverse. And wait, can we fit 3 spider people in there?”
The result was a bloated, disjointed mess of timelines and tone shifts. We got Comic-Con panels before the scripts were ready. We got characters without arcs. We got Secret Invasion.
James Gunn, now playing godfather over at DC, basically confirmed what we all feared. The Marvel machine was told to keep churning, whether it had anything worth churning or not. Feige lost control, a banker took over, and Marvel got hit with what can only be described as content quotas. Like it was a content farm. Like it was 5-minute craft.
And the saddest part? It didn’t have to be this way.
You want to know how to save the MCU? Here's what they should have done after Endgame: nothing. I mean it. Nothing. Just stop. Go dark. Go quiet. Let the dust settle. Let people mourn Tony and Natasha and Steve. Let YouTube run wild with “What’s Next for Marvel??” theories. Let us miss it.
But no. Instead of carefully re-building the universe back piece by piece, we got phase after phase of Marvel slop. We didn’t need quantity. We needed quality. What made the MCU work in the first place was care. Every movie felt like it mattered. Now? Everything feels like homework. Bonus points if you remember the name of that fast girl from Eternals.
This is the difference between letting a storyteller run the show and letting the C-suite executives do it. James Gunn literally said that over at DC, he refuses to move forward until there’s a script he personally approves of. His mandate? Make good stuff. That’s it. No calendar quotas. No arbitrary targets. Just make good stories.
And the irony is, Marvel used to be that.
Feige was our maverick. He had a vision. He let stories breathe. But when you make storytelling beholden to quarterly earnings and streaming targets, you get... whatever Phase 5 was. And yeah, there were bright spots - WandaVision was bold, Loki was weird, and Guardians Vol. 3 was a miracle. But those were exceptions, not the rule.
Now we're left with Kang recasts and multiverse burnout. We're watching once-beloved heroes reduced to meme bait. And we’re trying to remember if we actually liked Ant-Man or if we just liked Paul Rudd enough to pretend.
So yeah, it hurts. The MCU was more than just movies. It was a shared language. A cultural landmark. And we didn’t lose it because people stopped caring. We lost it because the people in charge stopped caring about what made it special in the first place.
I still love you, Marvel, But maybe it’s time to stop. Let us miss you. Let us wonder what could be next. And when you're ready, really ready - with a story that matters - then we’ll be here.
Just... maybe let Feige wear the crown again.
