Marvel Overload

For me, the best news in entertainment came several years ago when Disney announced it had purchased Lucasfilm and was planning a new trilogy of movies to end the Star Wars Skywalker saga. Not only did it remove creative control from the man responsible for the prequel trilogy, George Lucas, it promised years of anticipation waiting for each successive film to be released.

Capitalizing on the excitement and success of The Force Awakens, in spite of its critical decriers, Disney followed up with the marvelous Rogue One, my second-favorite movie in the Star Wars universe behind, of course, The Empire Strikes Back. This movie gave us something new—characters we hadn't met before and several explanations for plot questions going all the way back to the original—as well as something familiar...Darth Vader as an unstoppable killing machine.

I won't try to re-argue the point that so many fans seemed to miss with The Last Jedi, but I will acknowledge that the movie was divisive among the fandom, and that divisiveness absolutely diminishes the fun and the excitement that I find to be the heart and the purpose of the fandom in the first place. It's what I don't understand about haters...why be part of a fictional universe that you find about as much fun as a Soviet gulag? When I got tired of The Walking Dead, I didn't stick around and complain; I left. And funny to say, but I don't miss it at all.

You're gonna miss me when I'm gone.

Disney swung and missed with their next stand-alone movie, the ill-conceived Solo, which gave us a Han Solo who wasn't Harrison Ford and a story that we all knew for decades in our imagination, which meant that the execution could never live up to expectations. In the wake of disappointing returns from fans, critics, and box office receipts, Disney has wisely announced that after this year's final installment of the main story, The Rise of Skywalker, the next Star Wars films won't come out until 2022, 2024, and 2026.

Two years has become like five in an industry in which films basically have one to two months to make the lion's share of its box office take, which is even more important considering that the home video market, once a certain source of further income, has diminished significantly due to the prevalence and preference of streaming entertainment. Why has Disney intentionally made this choice? And what does it have to do with the recent glut of Marvel comics movies?

First, I think it has to do with the quality of the films. Two years in between releases means there is enough time to do everything that the filmmakers want to do in order to bring the movies to bear with the highest possible quality. Part of the flaws with Solo had to do with release pressure deadlines, part of the reason they fired the original directing duo and brought in the experienced hand of Ron Howard, whose work was certainly competent, but that film was not his vision in any way.

What the bloody hell?

Look also to the last two seasons of HBO's Game of Thrones. Someone should have insisted that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss take two years to create ten-episode seasons instead of rushing the narrative pace of seasons seven and eight. Like it or not, that decision took what looked like the greatest TV series of all time and turned it into another interesting show that failed to stick the landing.

Second, that two-year gap builds anticipation and excitement, which is the best marketing tool at their disposal. Waiting to see something means that you want to see something. Even The Rise of Skywalker is building that organic hype to critical mass right now. The premiere is less than six months away, and what do we have? A teaser trailer. That's it. Old-time burlesque dancers knew that what your imagination created behind that giant fan and those wisps of gauzy fabric were much more exciting that the skin revealed under bright lights could ever live up to.

So now, finally, Marvel movies. It's just too much, packed too closely together. Infinity War and Endgame were just one year apart, with Captain Marvel (which I loved, but with the same complaints I'm about to air) released a few months ahead of the latter. Now, not even after Endgame has left some theaters comes Spider-Man: Far From Home.

These are not installments in a weekly television series, but their proximity to each other is like in a sci-fi novel when two enormous planets pass too close to one another—the gravitational pull rips them apart. These should be EVENT movies, but the emotional impact of one film has hardly receded when the next one comes along. For the sake of the MCU, they need to take a pause.

The problem with these movies is the spectacle. Every action sequence, every conflict, every secret alliance revealed delivers a reduced impact because we just saw the exact same thing a few months ago. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a Spider-Man fanatic, and I will see every movie they make. But the action sequences seemed so familiar, so predictable, that they hardly held my interest. I was more concerned with whether Peter would get his chance to talk to M.J. in Europe or whether Happy and May would connect long-term than any of the "save the world" stuff that we've all gotten so used to seeing.

Far From Home is not a bad movie; it's highly entertaining and engaging, but at this point, it's like riding the same roller coaster for the eighth time in one day—been there, done that, it's fun but not surprising. Part of what makes event movies fun is the unexpected. I'm not under any delusions that anyone in the Disney/Marvel braintrust reads my little blog, but I love these movies enough to be willing to wait another two or three years until the next one comes out. Maybe their plan with Star Wars will carry over into the MCU as well.