Marvel's in trouble. This once-untouchable titan of a franchise has fallen to its knees in recent years. And it's gotten people wondering, should the MCU just scrap it all and reboot? Well, today, I have the answer. And that answer is us. These theory channels. Marvel needs to run more like us. Settle in as we give Mickey Mouse a speedrun lesson on the art of running a content business. Hello, Internet! Welcome to Film Theory, where today, it's time to show how a scrappy bunch of YouTubers are smarter than entertainment's biggest brand. So, I don't think it's a controversial take when I say that Marvel's really struggling right now. Box office returns and Disney Plus viewership are in the tank, and there's really no sign of it turning around. The recently concluded Loki premiered to 40% lower watch minutes and a fifth of the online chatter when compared to season one. And that's pretty bad considering the show before that, Secret Invasion, had the second worst numbers of any MCU Disney Plus series. In fact, release after release after release has seen a decline in overall viewership for the MCU extensions happening over on Disney Plus. But what's more concerning are the films. Multiverse of Madness? Disappointment. Love and Thunder? Disappointment. Quantumania? Huge disappointment. And while the numbers are still coming in as I write this, the Marvels is headed for the lowest opening of any MCU project ever. And that's including the Hulk movie from way back before this whole thing even got off the ground. Early data for the Marvels is comparing it to the performance of The Flash. And let's just say that you do not want to be compared to the box office performance of The Flash. In short, things are not looking so hot for this once-untouchable franchise. And it's gotten a lot of people to start asking, is it time for the MCU to reboot? And really, is this even that surprising a question to ask? Quality of the output aside, the MCU is very long in the tooth at this point. Especially when you're talking about a film franchise. Whether it's a soft reboot with a fresh creative team, a hard reboot where they start from scratch, or some mix of both, movie series don't go on this long without some sort of fresh coat of paint. Talks have even gotten so serious that rumors are now spreading that they're considering bringing both Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans back to reprise their roles in a desperate bid to bring audiences back to the franchise. But here's the thing, after looking deep into the problems that Marvel's facing right now, I'm convinced that a reboot would be the single worst idea that they could do at this point. So today, friends, I'm going to be taking a deep, hard look at Marvel Studios and how they've been handling their cinematic universe, and then give them some advice on how they can right the ship. Because the answers that they're looking for right now are actually a lot closer than they expect. They're right here, on this channel. A few months ago, I gave Disney a free consulting session on how our YouTube business can fix their movie business, and it looks like it's time for another session, covering a brand new slate of topics. Bob Iger, you and your shareholders might want to start taking notes, or you could always just invest those billions of dollars over here to a team who actually knows what they're doing. But there are popcorns for this one, friends, because let's be honest, you're not going to be eating it in theaters watching the Marvels this weekend, and let's dunk on Disney just a little bit, shall we? So the issues that Marvel's facing right now can really boil down into three main buckets. Person centricity, programming cadence, and audience trust. So let's just take them point by point and see where we can fix things, shall we? Main problem number one, person centricity. Basically what this means is that there's one person in the company who is way too important for the business to be growing sustainably. You see, despite some corporate meddling here and there, the way Marvel Studios has operated has come down to what Kevin Feige decides is best. It's either his way or the highway, with all the decisions ultimately funneling up to him. And this is true at all points in Marvel's production. Several writers and directors like Edgar Wright and Scott Derrickson left their projects due to creative differences with Feige. Other directors like Nia DaCosta admitted that they didn't have any creative control over their work. All of this was an intentional structural decision. Feige was frustrated by the lack of control that Marvel had over their projects pre-MCU, quoted as saying, "we suggested but they didn't listen.
We didn't have control. I hated that." And you know what? For a while, this structure worked. There are a lot of advantages to this sort of arrangement. When you have a figurehead like this, you have a consistent guiding force. The person gathers a lot of institutional knowledge and makes sure that everything's focused in the right direction because it's their sole creative decision. They and the brand are united as one, which makes sure that everything feels cohesive. And when the MCU was running at a much smaller scale, just a couple films a year all leading to a giant crossover, having that sort of singular vision worked. And when you think about it, this is actually the same model that most YouTube businesses start off with. There's one central figurehead that's the centerpiece for the brand, the one responsible for making all the decisions. For MrBeast, it's Jimmy. For Mythical, it's Rhett and Link. For MKBHD, that's Marquez, and for all of us here at Theorist, it's me. And oftentimes, everything gets funneled up through the company to these central figures who then is responsible for making the decisions. And just like with Kevin Feige, there's a lot of efficiency in that process. Because these people know their brand. They know the content. They know their community better than anyone else. Oh, this worked really well for our thumbnails two years ago. Ah, people didn't really care for the episodes when we scripted it this way. Oh, this is the best way to do brand deals, trust me. I've been doing it for five years, and, uh, we've already done an episode like this. We just did it, you know, ten years ago. But as you might imagine, there are a lot of negatives when you're working with that sort of structure. Things can become stagnant without other fresh voices coming in with new ideas. And as the company grows, that person's time becomes more and more split, and quality starts to dip without some sort of strong guiding hand at the helm. This is where I see Marvel right now. This is a stat I've pointed to a couple times in the past, but I'm just gonna bring it up again here because it's mind-boggling. If you look at the number of minutes of content released into MCU, there's just too much. Phase 4 had a staggering 3,500 minutes spread across two years, mostly thanks to the introduction of Disney+. That is more than phases 1 to 3 combined. And as a result, Kevin Feige is losing control. Storylines feel disjointed, and it's suddenly difficult for characters to feel consistent between all the different projects. The first time viewers felt this was with Wanda going complete villain from WandaVision to Doctor Strange. Even Elizabeth Olsen wasn't a fan of this, and revealed that it happened because the writers of WandaVision were given no information about Multiverse of Madness. The same thing just happened with Nick Fury's character between Secret Invasion and the Marvels. As film analyst Dan Murrell actually said in his recent review, I was thinking, this has to be a variant of the Nick Fury that was just in Secret Invasion. His characterization is almost insultingly 180 degrees from the character that we just saw on that Disney Plus series. All in all, this seems to be a failure of business structure. Information isn't being properly shared across the people making the films and shows. In the past, Kevin Feige would have been the guy passing that information along. But now, more and more cracks in information are starting to show up as more and more projects are having to be juggled. But thankfully, there are ways to mitigate this issue. Main thing I recommend? Break your organization down into units, each with a leader who can keep it running smoothly. While it's not really my place to speak about other YouTube business models, I can give you a peek behind the curtain here, Theorist. You see, we started running into the same issue after we launched Food Theory. Between Game Theory, Film Theory, Food Theory, and GT Live, writing and overseeing every single project just wasn't possible for me to do alone anymore. What we ended up doing was breaking the company down into units, one for each channel, with a Creative Director in charge of production and scripting, as well as managing any sort of crossover events. That's why you've seen people like Lee, Tom, Amy, and Santi popping up more and more. They're the ones driving a lot of the creative forward, helping choose programming, making sure information and production quality is at the same level and ideally higher than it was when I was doing everything solo. Because honestly, it's their full-time job to keep track of all this, to be experts in all this and the things that we're talking about. It helps us raise the bar and do more without spreading ourselves too thin. It also allows us to tackle more big projects for each channel, like a fashion show on Style Theory, or a travel show on Food Theory, or season 2 of Game Lab over on Game Theory, because now each channel is able to be its own living, breathing entity. A channel all its own, with its own brain, in the mode of a Creative Director, rather than me having to divide my limited time and resources like some sort of parent trying to decide which child gets my attention next. It also lets us start new initiatives much more easily, like social media and podcasts. Speaking of, we actually did just launch an audio podcast version of Film Theory over on Spotify. If you want to listen to Film Theory on the go, that right there, that is the best place to do it. We have a ton of our episodes already up there, including some of our Marvel theories like Thanos was right, or whether Thanos was worthy. Honestly, I'm just a fan of Thanos over here. We also have some certified Film Theory classics in there, like our Disney Death Count. Which Disney movie has the highest death toll? Listen to that one and you'll find out. Regardless, if you're an audio listener and want some Film Theory hits to have on the go, check out the audio version of Film Theory over on Spotify. Link is down in the description. Anyway, this is exactly what Marvel needs to do as a good first step towards righting their ship. Break things down into more manageable sections. Marvel Street Level. Marvel Cosmic. Marvel Magic and Horror. Whatever it is. Each with a trusted producer keeping tabs on those characters, and then communicating with the other producers when those characters get shared. Then all of that can get run up the chain to Feige for final approval, or any sort of specific notes that he might have. Interestingly, this is actually something that Marvel flirted with in the past and seemed to be doing again. Before they fired him, James Gunn was set up to be the guy in charge of the Cosmic side of Marvel Studios. That never happened. It seems, though, like they might be trying again as the company just launched a new Marvel Spotlight banner, meant to focus on street-level characters that don't need a bunch of homework to understand. No word yet on if there's a specific producer shepherding Spotlight to get some of that work off Feige's plate, but hey, it's a start. In the short term, it might seem like a reboot could fix this problem. Yeah, completely wiping the slate clean would make things much more approachable for fans, and let you start fresh with characterization. You suddenly don't have to worry about whether or not a joke Captain America makes in Movie 25 lines up with his opinions from Movie 3 15 years ago. But this is a short-term solution that still results in the same issues down the road if the core structural company-wide problems aren't addressed. So in this case, I don't think a reboot would actually help all that much. But this then leads nicely into problem bucket number two, your programming cadence. When you're planning out a schedule for any sort of entertainment nowadays, whether it's a YouTube channel or the MCU, you need to be aware of what you're releasing and in what order. Again, think about how to run a YouTube channel. The last thing you want is to spam your audience with a bunch of content that they're not going to be interested in. If you're subscribed to this channel for Film Theory, which generally comes out once a week and has itself a very specific style, if I then start uploading a bunch of vlogs about my life, you're gonna be pretty mad, right? Or maybe even less extreme, if I start uploading movie reviews, or Easter egg breakdowns, or interviews with celebrities. Sure, some of you might like some of those because it's still film-related, but it's not the show that you signed up for. I'm spamming most of your feeds with stuff that isn't gonna be interesting to you, and bit by bit, you're gonna start checking in on us less and less frequently. Even within Film Theory itself, that's why we have to be so careful about episode selection. We like to cover everything on this channel, whether it's a big blockbuster film in cinemas to an undiscovered indie series on YouTube. But obviously, not everyone who watches a Paw Patrol video are then gonna hop on over to our videos on The Backrooms. So within our programming, we have to be careful of delivering you the episodes that you're most excited about, while also interspersing in things that we think are cool and might end up being your new favorite franchise that we cover. This tricky balancing act of programming is actually why it's so hard to find variety channels on YouTube anymore. It's easiest to just have one channel do one format on one specific thing, or have one person be the connective thread on each and every video all the time. Because that's what works easiest for audiences, and also that's what works for the algorithms. And hey, Marvel used to be the king of programming. When Guardians of the Galaxy was first announced, people thought it was gonna be Marvel's first flop, and for good reason. On paper, it should have been an absolute failure. They were a bunch of D-listers, and they were weird. But Marvel intelligently worked them into their schedule between a Captain America movie and an Avengers movie. That way, it could soften any bad performance blow. Couple that with a solid script, and you know what? That movie was a hit, and now everyone loves the Guardians. Captain Marvel? Roughly the same deal. A new character that they hoped to do big things with moving forward, getting sandwiched between two of the biggest movies of all time. And financially, it worked, with a fairly mediocre origin movie delivering a billion dollar box office smash, and introducing a recognizable, if not-all-that-beloved, new character into the roster. And if you look at the film output of Phase 4 on paper, it looked strong, riding off bangers like Endgame and Spider-Man at the end of Phase 3, we got Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and The Eternals. All a little bit risky, but hey, you're coming off of two billion dollar hits, so it gives you a couple movies to experiment. And guess what? Shang-Chi worked fairly well, giving them a new mid-performing franchise that they could now work into their programming slate. And then right after that, they had Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Thor, Black Panther, four huge franchises, all one after the other to rebuild momentum after a relatively slow period. Except Marvel forgot one thing. Those movies weren't the only part of the conversation anymore. With the addition of Disney+, the films became a much smaller part of the cultural conversation. Instead of all those big names happening in succession back to back to back to back, those films were now interspersed between a ton of smaller shows. All of a sudden, your heavy hitters aren't getting the room to breathe. And as for the quality of those Disney Plus shows, well, for every certified hit like Loki, you had disappointments like She-Hulk and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. You've gotta do better, Senator. Is this working for you? But what's worse is because the Disney Plus shows are released over time, instead of all at once, the conversation around them was stretched out for weeks. While the films get a flash in the pan discussion right after release, the shows? They're in the zeitgeist for months. Again, looking at the YouTube comparison, that would be like subscribing to this channel for film theory, giving you a medium-length, thoughtfully researched video every week, and us instead spamming your feed with shorter, cheaper, less well-written content every day. Some made for you, and lots of it not. Until you just eventually stop watching the channel altogether. For Marvel, a reboot here is not gonna solve the problem. If you go into a new rebooted universe and still program this poorly, well, you're still gonna spam your viewers. You need to be more discerning with who you're giving these Disney Plus shows to, while also working on their overall quality. Characters like Loki, Wanda, Falcon? Sure, it potentially makes sense to give these characters shows, they've been built up as side characters across the films, but does She-Hulk need a $25 million per episode series? Does it make sense to give Ms. Marvel her show before her debut in a feature film? Did Nick Fury need an ultimately pointless side quest? No, Marvel just started making everything, rather than really focusing on creating the stories that needed to be told. Which leads me then to problem bucket number three, audience trust. Fulfilling on the promise that you make to your viewers. Managing a YouTube channel is a lot like having a bank account. With each video I do, I'm trying to put a deposit into this bank of trust with you, the viewer. I make a video you like, well, you trust me a little bit more to deliver more things that you like, and as a result, you trust my judgment a bit more. Over years, I've hopefully been able to build a big deposit with you guys, but just like with a bank account, you can also make withdrawals. Every time I ask you to do something, that's a withdrawal. Try a video on a brand new franchise that you've never heard of, that's a small withdrawal. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet, small withdrawal. Go subscribe to Style Theory, or go over to Spotify to check out Film Theory's new channel over there, or buy some merch, or watch our premium show on TV, which doesn't exist yet, but who knows, maybe one day. Well, all of those are big withdrawals, because I'm asking for a lot of your faith and trust to do something out of the ordinary. For any smart content creator, your job is to maintain that balance of trust. Keep putting in deposits of trust over a long period of time, and make sure that you never overdraw your account, because that's when the audience stops investing. And the biggest draw that you can possibly make on that account is asking people to commit to something that you then give up on. We waited literal years to launch both Food and Style Theory, because we wanted to make sure that we had the systems in place to deliver those channels consistently, forever. The last thing we wanted was to launch something, only to then let it die, leaving you guys with nothing but a broken promise, a betrayal of your trust. Back in the day, this is what set the MCU apart from the other attempted cinematic universes. When Nick Fury stepped out of the shadows and told Iron Man about the Avengers initiative, we knew that we were going to be getting that big crossover. When Thanos put on the gauntlet and said, Thanos- Fine, I'll do it myself. We knew that it was going to pay off, and relatively soon. Even small things like, Thanos- I can do this all day. Is a deposit of trust, because it shows an internal, consistent logic of character that rewards all the long-term fans of the franchise. But these days, because there's new Marvel content basically every single week, and it's all from such random corners of the MCU, there's been no follow-through with so many of the things that they've teased. That trust is broken, and there are too many loose ends that have been left unresolved. There's a giant celestial in the ocean that literally no one cares about. Moon Knight had the entire world see an accelerated day-night cycle that's never mentioned again. The Young Avengers have been teased for so long that, really, who even cares anymore? Team up or don't. Just don't care, just move on. And that's just a fraction of the ones that come to mind. From small characters like the Black Knight, to huge issues like how the multiverse feels like it functions differently in almost every new project, these things are breaks in the audience's trust that tells us, well, if Marvel didn't care enough to get it right, why should we? And even when they do explore the exciting concepts they introduce, it's underwhelming. I don't think anything epitomizes this more than the multiverse. Sure, some of it's been cool, we got glimpses of it with Loki in No Way Home, but most of it just didn't land. Remember the hype online when it looked like they were about to bring in Quicksilver from the Fox movies, and then the payoff was just a bad joke? Ralph? Bohner? Bohner. What If promised to be a bold, different take on all your favorite MCU heroes, and what we got were 30-minute chunks of less-good versions of movies that we'd already seen. They told multiverse madness on this deep dive into weird worlds like the Paint Universe, and what we got was a quick montage and 45 minutes in a world identical to the main MCU with the saturation turned up. This just isn't living up to the promise that they're giving us. The quality isn't there. It'd be like me hyping up our new apparel as the best stuff ever, only for you to get it and then it be nothing more than just a run-of-the-mill t-shirt. That's why we put so much care into the stuff that we put out, because when you click on a video, or buy a jacket, or subscribe to a new channel, we want you to know that your trust hasn't been misplaced, that it's been worth it. And rebooting the MCU right now might be the single worst decision that they could possibly make to tackle that problem. It would cause far more harm than good, because it would basically tell us that everything that we've spent time waiting for has been for nothing. Were you excited to see Sam Wilson tackle what it means to be Captain America? For the next generation of heroes to finally take on the mantle of the Avengers? For Blade to fight some vampires? A reboot would basically say, eh, too bad, and make you feel stupid for wanting those things in the first place. Instead, just like with the programming cadence, the solution here is to just re-evaluate the slate of films and shows. Really double down on what people are actually excited about, and explore those things to their fullest potential, instead of dangling something new in every post-credit scene like keys distracting a dog. But here's the big twist. While I've been holding ourselves up as the model to follow here, I recognize you might be too proud, Marvel, to follow the advice of some lowly YouTuber. So, you don't have to take my word for it, you can take a look much closer to home, your own comics division. They can also tell you why rebooting would be a bad idea at this point. You see, Marvel has tried rebooting before with the Ultimate Universe. In the early 90s, the comic industry collapsed, and Marvel in particular was hit hard, resulting in their bankruptcy. This is actually when they sold off a lot of their film rights just to stay afloat, and why we got movies like Blade, X-Men, Spider-Man, and Daredevil. Anyway, in an attempt to drum up excitement for the brand, modernize their characters, and offer brand new perspectives on the old lore, Marvel made a bold decision. They were going to start a second mainline of comics that would run alongside their 616 universe, and they were calling it Ultimate Marvel. Basically, it was just them experimenting with rebooting the whole company. At the beginning, it ended up being one of Marvel's biggest success stories, with this universe's flagship book, The Ultimates, being the single most successful comic book of the year. But despite that initial burst of success, the Ultimate Universe quickly petered out, dwindling in sales until the entire line was eventually canceled and the universe destroyed in the Secret Wars event from the mid-2010s. The only part of it that lives on is Miles Morales, who was transferred over to the mainline Marvel Comics universe, which itself just continued to chug along the entire time and still go into this very day. A reboot for the MCU would be the YouTube equivalent of clickbait, or an unwarranted we need to talk guys video. Sure, it gets people to click and get some talking about you again, but it's short term. It's a hollow victory. It's a cheap trick that does worse for the trust that your audience has in you in the long term. I mean, if every new movie changes everything, why should I ever invest my trust in here in the first place? If the MCU is going to survive, it needs to put in the work to fix its real problems. It needs to give us clear leadership, it needs programming that makes sense, and it needs to fulfill on the promises that it makes to us, its viewers. Will that be hard? Sure. But it'll be far more worth it in the long run than the short term solution of just wiping the slate clean and starting it all from scratch. But hey, that's just a theory. A FILM THEORY. And cut.
I agree with a lot of his takes in here. My main suggestion is to have an avengers movie asap and kill off a ton of characters and kill off the multiverse.
How can you have the upcoming X-men and fant4stic and still have 15-20 heroes from previous movies and shows? Have your new top villain kill off the characters no one cares about. America Chavez, Eternals, shehulk, moon knight are all dead. Nick fury, Hawkeye, hulk and Thor are all retired. Kang is dead and buried.
Reboot would be the worst thing for Disney because we all know it wouldn't improve the quality and I think they know it.
Iād prefer no more team up movies but solo movies of MCU heroes. Solo movies add more depth to the characters (eg. Raimi Spider-Man, Logan, TDK, The Batman), while team up movies do character development in throwaway lines.
Truth be told I don't really know what the answer is anymore even if Marvel got out from Disney and the same happened with Sony we may still have the same problem superhero movies have become oversaturated. If this were a perfect word with Marvel I'd make a Deadpool kills the Marvelverse and then start from there.
I like that he attempts to give advice through the perspective of a content creator. "If this is the route you want to venture down, then this is most likely the best way to do it."
In that regard he gives sound advice. It just can't fix the fact that the ceo of Disney is clearly not capable of letting others have control over different aspects of the company and he's a numbers guy who treats art like product.
I doubt Disney will ever improve as long as that clown is in charge. Which is fine by me because I no longer want Disney to succeed. They need to go and make space for new generations of entertainment where people have some semblance of integrity, creativity and morals.