This Friday, na what seems like an endless wait, Thor: Love and Thunder touches theatres. As it does, fans will also indulge in the penultimate episode of Mrs. Marvel, which concludes the six-episode season on Disney+ next week. This isn’t the first time Marvel has doubled the content. Last year, Spider-Man: No Way Home fell half way hawkeye‘s streaming run, and Black Widow opened just like Loki was in the process of finishing its first season. Just a few years ago, fans had to wait months between new episodes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; now there are often several things to look at at once – and it will only get worse.
Or rather, better. To be clear, this is not a rant against oversaturation. we have already done that† Instead, this is about a quest to balance one’s Marvel media diet. Despite all the fuss that the superhero market is a bubble about to burst, people are clamoring for this content. Three big-screen movies and somewhere between four and five Disney+ projects a year don’t even seem to meet the demand for the Marvel brand these days. Now, in the span of ten years, Marvel has successfully recreated the comic book experience in the mainstream media.
This isn’t to say that Marvel invented good comic book movies – they’ve been around ever since Superman: the movie came out in the 70s and Tim Burton recorded a crack Batman in 1989. And the studio didn’t invent serialized stories across multiple platforms, either. Star Trek did when it had two shows and the occasional movie in theaters in the early ’90s. Instead, this is about Marvel putting out so much content that fans are forced to pick a character, faction, or storyline and stick with it.
To understand how this might go, think back to Marvel in the 80s and 90s. As the company’s popularity exploded thanks to the work of creators like Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, Walt Simonson and others, new series and new heroes were constantly being added to the Marvel series. Some were spin-offs with existing characters—the Punisher was a villain in Spider-Man comics for over a decade before becoming a publishing success of their own—while others were cut from scratch entirely in hopes of finding an unexpected big next. thing, even if they would soon melt back into creative limbo. (Unfortunately, bad Slapstick, bad NFL SuperPro, bad US1…)
During this time, however, Marvel’s output began to exceed what a person could reasonably read. While the company’s line grew more than 30, 40, 50 songs a month, only mega fans – self-proclaimed “Marvel Zombies” – could make it. The average fan started choosing what to follow; “Marvel fans” became “X-Men fans” or “Spider-Man fans.”
The company knew this, and even leaned against it for a while. In the mid-1990s, it replaced its general editor with five group editors, each overseeing one element of a line divided into popular brands, or “families” of comics. That attitude didn’t last, though — eventually the X-Men group editor was promoted over the others.
We’re not at the point where Marvel is producing as many shows and movies as comics ever did, but in terms of the hours of attention it takes to keep up with everything, fans are arguably reaching a similar breaking point. Despite a (perhaps now abandoned) motto that claimed “it’s all connected,” the more Marvel Studios produces, the more important it will become for audiences to pick the stories and characters to follow and leave the rest behind…unless they want to nothing but watch Marvel Studios productions from now on.
It’s a change in attitude that’s likely to have the same impact on Marvel Studios as it did on Marvel Comics, allowing creators to get weirder and move away from a singular company-wide tone, freed from the expectation of reaching the widest possible audience. always. Something like Mrs. Marvel shows how good Marvel can be when it gets specific – and who doesn’t want to see more of that? So vote with your dollars and streaming hours, Marvel fans: you’re just making the MCU a better and more interesting place to be.