Has Superhero Fatigue Finally Come?

For the past year or so, one of the predominant conversations in movie spaces has been about the state of superhero movies. It's no surprise. Superhero movies have been a supreme cultural touchstone for more than a decade now, the biggest, flashiest cinematic sensations that studios have been pouring the bulk of their money and resources into. And so we can't help but pay close attention to shifts in their successes and public perceptions, whether in ripples or waves. The superhero monoculture genre, by which I really just mean those multi-million dollar products stemming from the two giants Marvel and DC -the former controlled by Disney and Sony, the latter by Warner Bros, has indisputably taken a hit in recent years. To the point that one company (at least the non-Sony part) is scaling back considerably while the other is engaged in completely reinventing itself. 

After seven years of releasing three to four new movies per year (not counting the anomaly that was 2020 of course), the MCU has just one film release for 2024 -Deadpool & Wolverine- for the first time since 2012. After three years of three to five TV seasons for Disney+, it has limited itself to just two for this year -the already released Echo, and the Halloween-themed Agatha All Along. DC meanwhile, having last year dumped all that was left of its own cinematic universe, has likewise just one branded movie set for this year, Joker: Folie a Deux -a sequel to a continuity-free incarnation of the Batman universe. On the TV front it also has merely two shows on the docket for 2024: The Penguin series spun-off of another standalone feature The Batman, and an animated show called Creature Commandos. And maybe with the TV shows this still sounds like a lot (and Sony will still be following up its disastrous Madame Web with a probably equally disastrous Kraven the Hunter), but it is unusually minimal on both fronts given how much they've flooded the market with their products in the past decade.

There has been talk going back years of ‘superhero fatigue’ -the supposed widespread disillusionment by audiences around the superhero genre. And it has often come from people decrying the genre already, mistaking their own feelings as a consensus. And for most of the last fifteen years or so that has not been the case. Much as the detractors have moaned about the superhero genre or individual instalments from either Marvel or DC, box office receipts tell a different story. Massive audiences kept coming back for them and superhero fatigue gradually became an unsubstantiated arguably meaningless term.

But now we are actually seeing the popularity of the superhero genre in a kind of flux it hasn’t experienced since before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was established. It does genuinely seem that more and more people are tiring of the genre and its perceived formulas and faults. So it begs the question, has superhero fatigue finally come?

Well let’s step back a little bit and look at how we got here. The modern superhero era, though presaged for a while through major comic book hits such as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, really began in full force in 2008 with The Dark Knight on the DC end and Iron Man from Marvel. The former was revolutionary in tone and scope for a superhero movie, not to mention critical appeal -it became the first superhero film to win a major Oscar. The latter meanwhile, though starkly different in tone (get it!), crystallized the more vibrant comic book aesthetic in a way that was palatable to modern tastes -and of course it had that post-credits scene. Both movies were decidedly contemporary in structure and theme, and both represented what the superhero genre could evolve into. From here, DC set on a path to recapture The Dark Knight’s grandiose, serious, and “gritty” spirit, while Marvel set up the cinematic universe experiment that would pay off exponentially, first in 2012’s The Avengers, and then in just about every subsequent movie they would release for nearly a decade -DC would eventually belatedly attempt to replicate this model.

It turned out well for both companies, though especially on the Marvel end, which trained its audience to expect, anticipate, and follow the continuity from movie to movie even across differing superheroes and their stories. The perception was drilled in of the MCU instalments as episodes in a series -or indeed as issues of a comic book- all of it interweaving and building towards a grand finale. You had to watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier to be up to speed on Avengers: Age of Ultron, and you had to see Thor: Ragnarok to know what happened to the Hulk at the end of that movie -also featuring a small though significant appearance by Doctor Strange, whose backstory is explained in his own movie. And all throughout you have to be aware of who Thanos is, glimpsed in snippets of a handful of episodes, and why his coming several movies down the line is going to be so momentous.

The manner in which this worked for general audiences set off the spark of the brief cinematic universe sensation in Hollywood, with rival companies making plans to set up their own. Yet none ultimately worked like Marvel, looking to jump into the fad rather than establish it organically. And it only made Marvel look more exceptional. After The Avengers, fourteen of their subsequent seventeen movies over the next seven years grossed in the annual top ten (Doctor Strange and the two Ant-Man movies being the outliers, though not failures by any means). During that time, those lists also included six DC superhero movies, three from Fox, two from Sony, and one animated film from Disney -The Incredibles 2. And while that accounts for just over a third of the biggest earners in that period of time (most of the others were franchise fare too), the cultural hegemony of the superhero genre, and of Marvel in particular far outpaced any rivals. It along with Star Wars became all the popular movie discourse cared about as we kept up with these grand ongoing storytelling events of our generation. Sure there were naysayers, but they were firmly the losers against Marvel's ever-increasing popularity. In 2018 their film Black Panther even managed to get some cultural prestige, winning multiple Oscar nominations and tons of recognition for its black cultural significance.

And then, Endgame. After eleven years, Marvel’s grand project culminated -in a pair of movies but substantively just the latter part in 2019- with the grand finale each movie in its own way had been building towards. Avengers: Endgame finally brought the resolution of the story thread that had been building, brought together virtually every character from every corner of the universe, and closed out the stories for its two most prominent heroes -Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Chris Evans’s Captain America. It was a three hour superhero epic that functioned as both a trip down memory lane (through its use of time travel as a plot device) and a celebration of everything the universe had achieved to that point. And it was rewarded for it, becoming for a time not only the top earner of 2019 but the highest-grossing movie of all time (James Cameron’s Avatar subsequently retook that spot through a re-release in China). Superhero cinema had reached its apex.

That was just five years ago, but the landscape has changed dramatically since then, and a large part of it has to do with where Marvel has gone post-Endgame and how much the audience once so attached to that universe has followed them. But Endgame is the crux, all of the fault lines that have come from Marvel since can be traced back to it.

Because here’s the thing: Endgame felt like a finale in both the best and worst senses of the term. It brought to a close both the Infinity saga and the major story arcs that had permeated the franchise. It left a couple ideas open for the future, but these were mostly lost in the air of conclusiveness Endgame brought about in its grand climax. And at the end of the day these leftovers weren’t so compelling on their own terms. Add to that the fact that Marvel essentially blew its load with Endgame. It brought all the characters together in a bad-ass ultimate fight. It’s the kind of novelty you can’t pull off twice and expect the same result. How does Marvel top that? Where do they go from there -and without some of their most popular characters?

And this was an issue facing Marvel before the pandemic came and disrupted the MCU as it did all other movie projects. It came just as they were ready to launch a slate of new TV shows for Disney+ in addition to more movies. Marvel, and the larger superhero machine was forced into a break of more than a year -which unintentionally further marked Endgame as a definitive endpoint. When they came back starting in 2021, they came full-force and beginning with the première of WandaVision there was barely a week that year without a new Marvel thing entering the media. They dropped five shows to Disney+ that year in addition to four movies -getting out that backlog from the pandemic.

To cut to the chase, they over-saturated the market  and it didn’t pay off. It was too much Marvel, and more importantly too much B-tier Marvel to most viewers. What Kevin Fiege and his team failed to realize was that though they had sometimes catered to the committed super-fans, Marvel had thrived off of casual viewers, who could manage following the franchise’s basic storylines and direction when it only meant an occasional commitment to going to a movie. Now, to follow along with the universe you were expected to keep up with multiple TV series released to a platform behind a pay-wall in addition to even more movie commitments per year than before -and just about all of which centring on characters who weren’t anywhere close to the household names that Iron Man, Captain America, and even Thor were.

But also, the quality control at Marvel under all these projects proved difficult to manage. Of those nine titles that came out over 2021, only three of them managed the kind of appraisal, from both critics and fans, that past Marvel projects had enjoyed: WandaVision, Loki, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. This last ended up introducing the next big thing for an ongoing narrative Marvel now sought to exploit: the multiverse -a concept that could do the same thing The Avengers did in bringing together different heroes, but provided the success of some savvy acquisitions, could expand it’s scope to other media variations of these characters or beyond. Already, we see such a prospect is what motivated Disney to buy 20th Century Fox, a studio much bigger and more important than a handful of X-Men and Fantastic Four movies, but you only need look at how little Fox has produced since the merger to see where the purchasing priority lied.

A move such as this and other desperate attempts to satiate audiences started to look more patently cynical, and as the Marvel machine kept running through 2022 the public perception of the studio continued to change. And maybe it was the sheer number of projects in close succession that built out this cynicism, forced audiences to really notice the narrative, thematic, and stylistic formulas that had always been there. There were some shallow attempts to mend these, the Marvel directors that year were all given notably more creative control, which paid off well for Sam Raimi, poorly for Taika Waititi, and barely noticeably for Ryan Coogler. But they still weren’t that distinct really, and some choices particularly in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder just alienated both casual viewers and hardcore fans. There lacked the kind of singular drive to the stories, and perhaps more importantly the universe as a whole.

And in 2023, shit really hit the fan. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania opened to a relatively tepid response, despite hype in setting up the next big chapter for the MCU. By any reasonable metric it would be a hit, but the Marvel budgets had so ballooned out of control that it failed to break even. Within a month of the movie opening, Jonathan Majors -who’s Kang was meant to be the next big villain for this phase of Marvel- was credibly accused and later found guilty of assault. Disney had to fire him and seemingly scrap this plan that had progressed just one movie too far to be organically backed out of. Their big series of the year, Secret Invasion was panned and mocked in the online community once so friendly to them, and even a well-received second season of Loki prominently featured Majors, so was bad for PR. Marvel found itself significantly out-gunned at the box office by the likes of Barbie, Oppenheimer, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie; and also out-Gunned by their only real hit of the year being James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, lauded precisely for its lack of connection both narrative and tonal to the rest of the MCU. And he now stood to be their competition over at DC. It culminated at the end of the year with The Marvels -a sequel to one movie and three TV shows, which became the studio’s biggest flop in its history. Had the Age of Marvel reached its’ end?

Marvel was by far the biggest player in the superhero genre, which is why I’ve been so concentrated on them. But DC perhaps presaged this through their very different history over that period. They much earlier started losing their audience -the shared universe on their end always seeming disingenuous next to Marvel. The coldness and harshness of Zack Snyder’s take on Superman and Batman wore out its welcome quickly, as DC pivoted to more rounded tones in Wonder Woman and Aquaman. Rushing to play catch-up with Marvel paid off for them in one sense. The original theatrical cut of Justice League and its poor reception humbled DC a tad, as it started to stylistically differentiate its movies and let them stand alone, while pretending that its linked universe was still relevant. The success of the one-off standalone Joker movie by Todd Phillips and then The Batman by Matt Reeves demonstrated something that Marvel had taken for granted. That audiences had largely grown out of shared universe muck, and that they care more for the icons than the general masses of superheroes. While Marvel was spinning its wheels, DC it could be argued was experimenting -and then David Zaslav got his hands on the company, killed one of its more interesting projects, endeavoured to revive the failed experiment through Black Adam (a movie that demonstrated the limits of the Rock’s star power), resulting in 2023’s garbage fire where they had to unload the last of those misguided DCEU projects before completely wiping the slate -all but one of which were terrible, all but one of which were flops, and The Flash after years of painful development and on the heels of its’ stars’ predator spree, came out as both to historic proportions.

It’s the kind of thing that dampens what goodwill DC had managed to nurture, and the reminder that their bad movies are generally much worse than Marvel’s. In the last couple years they haven’t done any favours to the superhero genre in spite of their apparent greater willingness to think outside the box. And so here we are. The once-dominant superhero genre in a pretty sorry state into the early 2020s. Everything I have presented makes for an argument towards superhero fatigue. Companies in creative disarray putting out too much too quickly and to vastly different levels of consistent quality. The audience is no longer automatically in the bag. Have we finally reached breaking point?

The best I can determine is not really. It does sort of depend on what you define as superhero fatigue on a collective basis, whether it is more tiredness or frustration. Some would tell you the late response has been more of the former, others the latter. A common refrain to this question is that no, superhero fatigue is not here and it’s simply a matter of “audiences just want good superhero movies”. But this isn’t it either, as plenty of bad superhero movies have been hits in the past. And Quantumania is a good example of one that could be a hit from a certain viewpoint and would objectively have been if it didn’t cost so much to make and promote. But I do think the volume of criticism from multiple sectors against every project has resulted in a negative air pervading the genre. Even if you’re not watching the movies yourself, the impression that you have been receiving has been much worse through channels of social media and word-of-mouth.

But clearly the superhero genre isn’t dying. Though several recent movies have been disappointments, audiences are still turning out and in some areas growing. Quantumania did succeed in bringing in a lot more people to an Ant-Man movie, typically a lower-earning franchise within Marvel. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was way more successful than Into the Spider-Verse, probably in large part due to the immense acclaim for that film since its release. Both Marvel and DC are in positions to keep chugging along seemingly regardless of any number of failures -it’s just how big studios are built these days. And I firmly believe that name recognition matters, and that casual audiences -who Marvel in particular made the mistake of forgetting about- will show up for new Spider-Man or Batman movies, even a new Superman movie from James Gunn coming next year. The superhero genre still commands a great deal of attention and curiosity outside of the big two. Amazon’s got two TV shows that are violent satirical riffs on the format, both of which are very well-regarded across the board.

Superhero fatigue may one day happen substantially, perhaps once the generation that has grown up in the bloated superhero era comes of age in the industry to rebel against it, as has been the history of artists acting out against establishment structures. But it is not here yet. Deadpool & Wolverine is as likely to be a hit as it is to have multiple surface-level self-effacing cameos from MCU characters. It's going to take time to recalibrate, through some projects that no one has much interest in like Thunderbolts and Ironheart, but Marvel does have its Fantastic Four and X-Men cards to play, which could well make a difference for them. And the fresh start that Gunn is bringing to DC is likely to be appealing to all those audiences who gave up on the prior incarnation of that universe. At the very least, his new slate of movies are likely to be a lot more endearing than much of the DC dreck lately. And before that, I'm sure the Joker sequel will be a smash on par with the first movie. The superhero train is moving a bit slower but it hasn't stopped.

However, this isn't to say the superhero machine is totally safe from the changing winds of the monoculture landscape; or that the recent depreciation in popularity isn't going to have substantial effects on the superhero brands of Marvel and DC. Marvel has so thoroughly ruled the box office that it is a legitimate paradigm shift that the last few years they've actually had competition again. Other movies have stolen people's attention, the average guy who goes to one or two movies a year is not choosing the Marvel products anymore. And even if they are still making millions of dollars, the cultural conversation has moved away from them -it's one of the reasons "Barbenheimer" mattered.

Outright superhero fatigue is not here but the cultural monopoly of superhero media is fading. And it'll be curious to see where it is after this year. A pseudo-break as it is for both studios could either let the brands breathe or wound them by letting the culture get along fine without. Star Wars hasn't released a movie since 2019, and while yes they have released consistent TV shows to Disney+, the cultural ubiquity they enjoyed in the late 2010s is diminished. And their own ambitions don't seem very promising either.

Superhero media has always had a place and will continue to whether or not they are the biggest game in town. There is still something very attractive in their fantastical conceits and powers of immersion. For both DC and Marvel, though especially for Marvel, the formulas they have operated under have reached an end-point of effectiveness. And it needs to change for them to regain the clout and even dominance in a world that is very different than it was in 2012. Only if that itself fails will superhero fatigue really be proven as more than a fiction.

The fact that the superhero genre is going through this identity crisis after all those years on top can't help but feel cathartic and hopeful for those of us who long for more versatility and diversity in cinema; for the movie industry broadly, its troubles are a good thing. It is not as indestructible as was once thought -no genre or brand is. And even if what we're going through is not exactly superhero fatigue, that is a damn relieving confirmation.

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