The revival of Marvel

It’s never nice to be wrong. Last November, with the unwanted superhero sequel The Marvels about to flop, the would-be series starter Eternals already unpopular and with Marvel’s hotly tipped next star Jonathan Majors on the verge of conviction for assaulting and harassing his ex-girlfriend, thereby imperiling the Kang Dynasty that he was supposed to star in, I — and, to be fair, many others — began to wonder if Marvel’s once-golden touch had begun to desert it. After all, since 2008’s Iron Man, there had been countless films, television series and other spin-offs from the studio; it seemed inevitable that audiences would eventually lose interest. As I concluded, “all we can expect is more mediocrity, which will be punished with continual financial failure, until someone, somewhere learns their lesson. And that might take a considerable time.”

Well, the massive financial success of this year’s Marvel offering, Deadpool & Wolverine, has proved me incorrect. It opened to $205 million at the US box office in its first weekend, the highest-ever gross for an R-rated film, and made a further $233 million internationally. It is already the eighth-highest grossing picture of 2024 — and although it is unlikely to dethrone Inside Out 2, the highest-earning animated film of all time, it would be astonishing if it didn’t make at least a billion at the box office, probably more. Marvel is back, back, back, baby.

It is, admittedly, a pity that the movie that they have returned with — a profoundly irritating mash-up of fan service, metatextual in-jokes and poorly executed action scenes that show the hallmark of Shawn Levy, a hack who has somehow hit it extremely lucky thanks to his long professional association with the film’s powerful writer-producer-star Ryan Reynolds — is more of the same. But that, clearly, is what audiences want: a substandard Shane Black knock-off dusted with gags about pegging. Lessons have not been learned, because they did not need to be.

Marvel, and its ubiquitous, baseball-capped CEO Kevin Feige, are now once again invulnerable. They have celebrated by telling rapturous audiences that they will be seeing more of the same over the next few years. There is another Captain America film in February, in which most of the excitement revolves around the news Harrison Ford, a man now in his eighties, has to become Red Hulk and fight Giancarlo Esposito. (No, me neither.) And then the most depressing news is that the Russo brothers, TV directors who got lucky (a pattern forms here) will be making another two Avengers films, with none other than Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr., returning to the Marvel trough and this time playing the villainous Doctor Doom. (Where he got his PhD is an interesting thing to ponder — presumably the same university that educated Dr. Evil.) There are already a thousand eager threads and TikTok videos attempting to work out whether this is a return via the back door for Downey Jr.’s supposedly deceased Iron Man-Tony Stark character, but the larger and more pertinent question is simple: why on earth should we care?

Movies are in deep decline and have been for years. The problem with Marvel films is that everything we expect from motion pictures — humanity, wit, a universal expression of feeling — are wholly absent, replaced with a bizarre reliance on contrivance and universe-hopping, so as to ensure that none of their most popular characters can ever really be killed off. The brew is seasoned with the worst kind of smart-ass one-liners, all of which seem aimed at teenage boys who will lap up anything that they can describe as “cool” (and, in the case of Deadpool & Wolverine, enjoy the sensation of trying to sneak into an R-rated picture if they’re not yet seventeen). Marvel and Feige may yet be about to meet their Waterloo — and I can only hope that this comes to pass. But at the time of writing, I have to dejectedly raise a glass of Diet Coke to them and say guys, you win; here’s to many more years of profoundly mediocre, endlessly profitable rubbish.