10 Reasons Why Marvel Has Ruined Filmmaking

Chris Snellgrove is an English Professor by day and a pop culture writer by night. You can read his thoughts on celebrities over on Instanthub, thoughts on games over on Gammicks, and thoughts on everything else over on Ebaum's World.

Audiences love to tout the power of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Avengers: Endgame brought an epic, decade-long story to a satisfying conclusion. And Spider-Man: No Way Home showed that audiences were willing to risk getting COVID-19 in a theater just to see that wisecracking superhero on screen. 

Unfortunately, the success of Marvel has actually hurt the film industry as a whole. In fact, each new Marvel movie chips away at the integrity of modern filmmaking. And here are just a few of the reasons why that is. 

The “Cinematic Universe” 

https://newsakmi.com/news/entertainment/movie-reviews/why-universals-dark-universe-failed-before-it-began-according-to-van-helsing-writer/ 

The MCU was the first time since the old Universal monsters movies that we had a viable “cinematic universe.” And audiences, ranging from hardcore comics fans to complete normies, absolutely loved it. 

However, Marvel’s success inspired many other filmmakers to try to make a cinematic universe succeed. And all of them, from Universal’s attempt to bring the monsters into a “Dark Universe” to DC’s sad attempt, have been complete failures. If not for the MCU and its success, we wouldn’t have so many awful attempts to make a cinematic universe happen. 

The Focus On Comic Movies 

https://collider.com/comic-book-movies-of-the-2010s-ranked/ 

There was a weird time in the 1990s where the most successful comic movies of all time were Blade and Men In Black. But since 2008’s Iron Man, movies based on comic characters have only gotten more prominent. 

But if we’re being honest, most of them are pretty bad. Batman v. Superman was wet garbage, and Morbius looks like wet garbage after it has been digested. That new Fantastic Four movie should have made itself invisible, and the Venom movies are downright embarrassing. And we wouldn’t suffer from any of this if studios didn’t want to copy that Marvel magic. 

Movies As Theme Parks 

https://consequence.net/2019/10/martin-scorsese-marvel-movies-not-cinema/ 

Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese got a lot of heat for describing the MCU movies as more like “theme parks” rather than cinema. This got him a ton of criticism from rabid Marvel fans online who clearly refuse to touch grass until Disney makes some kind of grass action figure with Groot’s name on it. 

But Scorsese is completely right: these movies are mostly mindless theme park rides. And there is nothing wrong with enjoying a theme park ride just like there is nothing wrong with enjoying some junk food. But we can’t eat junk food all the time, and thanks to Marvel’s success, film studios want to crank out virtually nothing but vapid theme park rides again and again. 

Blurring the Lines of “Cinema” 

https://comic-cons.xyz/marvel-movies-list-order-release-date/ 

Part of what made crazy fans attack Scorsese is his dig that the MCU movies aren’t “cinema.” This led to countless fan defenses (some of them by very high-profile people) defending the Marvel movies as cinema. 

True cinema is meant to be a work of art. And art exists to challenge how we think and what we feel. A movie based on a comic that used to sell for a quarter about dudes in colorful spandex beating each other up will never be art and, therefore, never be cinematic. But this all becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: armies of idiot fans think all movies should be like Marvel movies. Eventually, most major movies are following that formula, and actual cinema suffers for this. 

Encouraging Formulaic Writing 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0cp0TyJH5Q 

Pretty much by definition, Marvel movies are based on a formula, just as the comics before them were. We typically see a character struggle with personal trauma, become a hero to deal with the trauma, fight a character from their past, and then the writer covers the whole thing with a sprinkling of weird humor. 

What was the last Marvel movie you saw that actually felt fresh and original? No matter your answer, the reason that movie stood out is that so much of Marvel is the same, and after nearly a decade and a half of these movies, it’s starting to show. But since the MCU is so successful, we see a constant stream of other movies resort to boring formulas as well. 

Tying Down Great Actors 

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/robert-downey-jr-sequel.html 

Landing a major role in the MCU is a bit like getting a golden ticket. That actor is now set for life. The only catch? The next 10 years (or more) of their career will primarily be devoted to Marvel movies. 

Sure, the MCU helped Robert Downey Jr. make life-changing amounts of money. But before the MCU, he was doing amazing work in films like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. How many great performances were we denied because he only had time to be Tony Stark for a decade? And how many more awesome actors is Marvel gobbling up? 

That Awful Digital Look 

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/marvel-cinematic-universe-films-ranked-women-on-screen-1201970403/ 

More and more people are finally returning to theaters to see movies. And many of them walk out with the same question: “why does everything look like a Netflix movie?” 

The short answer is that these movies are all shot digitally instead of on film. That may sound like a small thing, but there is a reason that many of the crappiest movies from the 80’s and 90’s look better than most modern film: the actual quality of the film stock. The MCU popularized digital shooting to accommodate their CGI, and the resulting popularity in digital shots has made most modern movies look terrible. Plus, for movies about colorful characters, more of the MCU than we’d like to admit looks like wet mud, especially during battle sequences. 

The Emptiness of CGI 

https://www.ranker.com/list/marvel-bad-cgi-scenes/grayson-titan 

Look, before you say it, I get it: more than most other franchises, the Marvel movies need CGI to bring some of the fantastic characters, settings, and events to life. But be honest: when was the last time an MCU fight felt very gritty and visceral to you? 

Disney has more money than God, so the CGI in the MCU is usually high-quality. But watching these scenes sometimes still feels like watching a video game cutscene. This is one of the reasons audiences loved stuff like the hallway fight in Daredevil: they were so used to CGI drudgery that practical stunts and an unbroken shot of a simple battle felt downright epic. Unfortunately, most studios have taken the MCU’s cue and added hollow CGI to movies that are already pretty darn hollow (for example, that weird prequel to The Thing). 

Awful Humor 

https://www.looper.com/151456/the-funniest-mcu-characters-ranked/ 

Joss Whedon has been having a rough couple of years. Every day, more people discover that this overrated director who built his career on being a so-called “feminist” is a world-class misogynistic creep to women and a general annoyance to most of the people he works with. 

While it’s not as egregious as all that, Whedon has another crime that he made the MCU part of: terrible humor. Whedon’s first Avengers movie was generally good, but every couple of minutes had some dumb pun or joke that deflated any possible tension. Now, movies that want to be successful can’t help but throw in characters ironically noting “well, that just happened,” not really realizing this is more in line with the Chandler Bing cinematic universe. Maybe the bad MCU humor could make like Whedon and disappear in disgrace? 

Content Overload 

https://www.pocket-lint.com/tv/news/disney/147979-upcoming-marvel-movies-and-tv-shows 

Many of the problems on this list are things that don’t affect Marvel but instead affect Marvel’s copycats. But there is one big problem that Marvel bears the burden of, and that is content overload. 

In the early days of the MCU, part of the magic was that the movies were friendly to newbies. You didn’t have to be an Iron Man comic fan to watch and enjoy an Iron Man movie. Now, the movies have copied the comic formula so much that they have created a complex and tangled web of stories. Marvel cranks out TV shows to help unpack movie plot points (such as what happened to Loki), but these TV shows end up merely complicating more things. 

Long story short? When there are countless online explainers for something as basic as what year it is in the MCU, then it’s clear that Disney chose profitable content over creating stories that simply make sense.