Comic Book Movies: How Much Longer?

Marvel keeps churning out content, and fans are starting to get exhausted.

Fans waiting in a movie theater lobby. Photo by Lallint via Flickr.

Comic book movies, unlike their characters, are proving to be less than invincible. With the rise of superhero-centric streaming services like Disney+, many fans are complaining about the saturated market and the overall drop in quality of superhero movies.

“The problem is that everything is required reading,” said Dan Amernick, senior professional lecturer of media arts at Marist College. “When you have to see three seasons of ‘Agatha All Along’ to understand the next movie…it feels a bit like homework.” 

The first Disney+ original show “WandaVision” debuted in 2021, and since then, the platform has 13 new shows, some of which have multiple seasons. A rough estimate of the time required to stay up to date in just 2021 is 30 hours of television. That’s 30 hours of different characters, villains and settings. Understandably, some people would find it difficult to keep up.

Amernick went on to explain how this “required reading” applied to the latest Ant-Man movie, “Quantumania.” To understand the main villain, Kang, a viewer would have to watch the first season of “Loki,” which would end up being a cumulative five hours of TV. That’s not the only movie with that problem. The Doctor Strange sequel “Multiverse of Madness” has a very distinct personality change to Elizabeth Olsen’s character Wanda Maximoff that is only explained if you watch the accompanying show, “WandaVision,” which is an additional 6 hours.

“It was better back during ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ when it felt optional, but not required. A side quest,” Amernick said. The show Amernick is referring to started in 2013 (after “Avengers”) ran for seven seasons and often filled in the blanks between the major Marvel events. 

The difference in this show versus the newer ones, however, is that while “Agents” often provided extra details to its fans, it was not mandatory. A viewer could watch the movies without watching the show and not miss any major context. 

While Amernick disagreed with many fans who say the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going downhill in quality, he did speak to how the franchise has written itself into a corner. 

“It’s hard to make a villain seem dangerous after a big cosmic villain like Thanos.” He went on to explain how it’s hard to make an audience feel engaged, or that there are real stakes when the current villain is so much less intimidating than the past villains. After “Avengers: Endgame,” things feel like they matter a lot less.

The fans who complain that after “Avengers: Endgame,” Marvel started to prioritize quantity over quality, are not empirically wrong. Of the nine movies released since “Endgame,” five of them are graded below a 7.0 on IMDb. With only a few exceptions, much of the new content has been below the standard that fans have come to expect from the company. 

However, that’s not to say that comic book movies are done. Many people have flocked to the newest installment in the Batman mythos, Matt Reeves’ “The Batman.” 

Brielle Polizzano ‘26 compares it to pizza. “It’s kind of like Giacomo’s versus Domino’s. It’s different cravings. If I want pizza — or an artistically sound film — I’ll choose Giacomo’s, but sometimes, I want Domino’s — Marvel movie fun.”