Even if you’re not a loyal reader of mine, you can tell that Disney is in the midst of a slow but sure collapse, and while all of its properties are undergoing some form of trouble, the one undergoing the most noticeable critical failure is Marvel.
The once indefatigable Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) went from being a multi-billion dollar golden goose for Disney to becoming one of the stones dragging it to the sea floor. While many heard the alarms blaring now for years and saw the collapse coming for some time, it was common practice for the access media to largely ignore the problem, and even attack those who pointed out that Marvel was sinking.
Marvel even went so far as to lash out at these very people in their television shows, such as when “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” dedicated time to not-so-subtly referencing YouTubers and internet critics who went after Marvel’s lazy and often politicized approach to show-running.
But now, the problem is so severe that mainstream publications aren’t just taking notice, they’re publicly discussing it in featured articles. While it dug into Disney/Lucasfilm, even the show South Park recently created an episode going after Kathleen Kennedy and her team for their approach to writing, which Marvel largely shares, pointing out that the problem is company-wide and that there’s a very wide hole in Disney’s hull.
One such publication was Variety, which featured an article pointing out the deep and noticeable troubles that Marvel is having. These include constant script rewrites, insanely bloated budgets, horrible VFX, insubordinate execs, and one of the main stars in this phase of the MCU facing down a high-profile court case for domestic violence charges.
If you were to line up 100 people and ask them why the MCU — and maybe even Disney as a whole — is sinking, you’d probably get 100 different answers and most of them would have an element of truth to them. The issues are many, but these are the spoke of a wheel and they all connect to one hub.
One thing you’ll notice reading the Variety article is that one of the biggest issues comes from bad writing. Script-rewriting and subsequent reshoots are a constant theme for Marvel, and it’s one that costs them billions to do. The Marvels, for instance, has apparently undergone so many changes both pre and mid-production that the film has now racked up a $250 million cost and it’s not expected to do well in theaters, with predictions sitting somewhere around $80 million at best.
As Variety noted, She-Hulk had to be rewritten and reshot to the point where the season finale cost $25 million, soaring past the budget for the entire final season of “Game of Thrones.”
Now, Marvel is staring down a massive expenditure with the upcoming Blade movie, which is undergoing severe reshoots thanks to a bad script that sidelined the feature character to a quarternary role so it could introduce a plot featuring life lessons for modern women because what audiences apparently want to see isn’t a badass half-vampire killing monsters, but a Lifetime movie in a superhero setting:
With Mahershala Ali signed on for the eponymous role of a vampire, things looked promising for a 2023 release date. But the project has gone through at least five writers, two directors and one shutdown six weeks before production. One person familiar with the script permutations says the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons. Blade was relegated to the fourth lead, a bizarre idea considering that the studio had two-time Oscar winner Ali on board.
All scripts undergo some level of rewriting, but the level at which it’s happening at Disney/Marvel is inexcusable, and all of this starts in the writer’s room with the writers that Disney is hiring.
And the reason they’re hiring such awful writers is that Disney has done away with valuing meritocracy and talent, and instead embraced the rot that comes with political activism. Writers are no longer chosen because they are good; they’re chosen because they check boxes and have the right opinions…opinions they then put into the shows and movies they create.
A solid example of this is Jessica Gao, the lead writer for “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” whose writing was a clear self-insert for her ideas toward modern women, dating, and feminist ideologies. She even openly admitted that she wrote parts of the show around the negative reactions she was going to get from fans of the swiftly collapsing MCU, making it clear that she was writing from a position of spite, not storytelling. Gao also knew nothing about courtroom dramas or lawyers, leaving a huge part of the lead character’s life completely ignored. Instead, they wrote what they apparently knew, so they made her a slut, a lush, and a shallow, self-obsessed modern woman with incredibly low opinions about men.
“She-Hulk” isn’t alone. Look into nearly every MCU creation right now, and you’ll hear troubling news about script rewrites, including Blade, which has, according to reports, undergone four major rewrites as it is, with one iteration being a direct rip-off of the movie Underworld according to Bounding Into Comics.
At this time, the entirety of the MCU looks to be under a rewrite due to the sudden departure of Jonathan Majors, this phase’s big bad, a character that was already underwhelming audiences to begin with.
What Marvel — and Disney as a whole — should be learning at this juncture is something that should have been learned years ago as corporations delved into politics and started bleeding cash.
Politics is divisive and divisiveness is expensive. When Marvel handed the keys of their high-performance vehicle to unproven writers who checked the right boxes, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that their ride would come back totaled. These writers weren’t in it for the love of the story or the characters; they were in it for the love of their ideologies and themselves, and that has unmistakably infected the brand.
As the great Andrew Breitbart once said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” Disney/Marvel, in its decision to leap into politics, abandoned their cultural power and instead of telling good stories with breathtaking visuals, began creating propaganda pieces that wore the mask of a brand that better men and women had created before them. They have abused their position in the culture.
If Disney and its brands truly want to recover, then the answer isn’t bringing back more beloved characters with name recognition to play on nostalgic feelings from a better time, which is their current plan. The answer is to stop focusing on DEI and ideologically biased requirements and begin hiring writers who truly care about and know the characters they’re writing. Writers who absolutely care about a good story being told and capturing audiences with good stories of properly told heroes journies and solid character archetypes required for said story.
No more “subversion of expectations” for the sake of subverting expectations. No more using these characters and universes as a “platform for change,” and definitely no more hiring writers with a built-in contempt for the audience and a strong desire to write their socio-political opinions into a story where they don’t belong.
While Disney/Marvel has a long way to go, hiring competent, talented, and level-headed writers is step one. Do that, and the script rewrites will shrink to a minimum, costly reshoots will reduce, test audiences will begin showing more positive responses, and you’ll find far fewer fans and commentators laughing movies and television shows off the proverbial stage.
