“It’s become really convenient to pick on [Marvel films],” Sebastian Stan said. “And that’s fine. Everyone’s got an opinion. But they’re a big part of what contributes to this business and allows us to have smaller movies as well. This is an artery traveling through the system of this entire machinery that’s Hollywood. It feeds in so many more ways than people acknowledge.”
“Sometimes I get protective of it because the intention is really fucking good,” Stan added at the time. “It’s just fucking hard to make a good movie over and over again.”
Stan’s Bucky/Winter Soldier will be front and center in next year’s Marvel tentpole “Thunderbolts,” and he hopes the character stays around long enough to meet Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom on the big screen.
“I hope I’m in a scene with him,” Stan says. “Is there any other guy that could pull that off? I don’t know, probably not. After ‘Tropic Thunder,’ is there anything that guy can’t do?”
I haven’t watched any MCU movies in a long time. My problem isn’t that there’s spectacle, it’s that it’s basically the same spectacle as the other movies, and the plots don’t add much either. The characters may change, but the plot is mostly identical. Some are more funny than others, and some have better written characters than others, but I can get better of both of those with other movies that may actually have something new to offer. My issue is most people watch these because it’s what gets the marketing budget. If they gave that budget to something new that wanted to be creative, I think that’d be more valuable. It’s not going to happen until the MCU burns though.
Effectively you’re voting with your wallet, and that’s fine. I’m not spending zero on Marvel stuff myself, but I am definitely spending noticeably less, because even if I’m not completely tuned out of their house style, any sense of urgency is long gone. That’s what will cause it to burn through, though, people not paying. Marvel needs to rethink their formula, and the other studios need to appeal to audiences with ideas better than “Marvel but not as fun.” Maybe that is what Stan is getting at when he asks the industry to offer something “better.”
I do still think there’s a naivete among certain cinephiles in and out of the industry that Marvel can be blamed for things, when they’re really doing little more than throwing money and talent at Saturday serials from 90 years ago. I just don’t think the trends that are sending The Irishman to Netflix or forcing Megalopolis to be self-funded are Marvel’s fault, or if they are it’s in a very fungible way, and superhero fatigue will result in a different variety of mass spectacle, which will be lauded for whatever minor innovation it brings before growing stale and being derided by the people who still won’t be finding an audience to hit “legacy” box office metrics.
Now, one thing I have kinda started to believe is that there was a certain value in the fuzziness of not being able to predict what would work, which I guess is a way of agreeing with you to a certain extent. The studios have never done anything without an eye towards profit, and maybe the fact that the Marvel formula worked so well made it easier to keep going to the well (or trying to dig their own well), with less money being thrown around trying to guess what would fit the moment and blow up. We’ve certainly lost some stuff that would have been creative successes, but a lot of that talent has migrated to streaming in various ways, and most of we truly missed out on would have been just as cookie cutter as Marvel. The cinemas in the 90s and earlier were frequently just chock full of absolute garbage, and sometimes you’d watch the garbage just because the theater was a third-place and your only TV was a 19" glass box with two shitty speakers.