If Everyone's a Marvel then No-one's a Marvel

I don't plan on seeing The Marvels in the theatre but I will watch it on Disney+. I'm an MCU completist at this point and, as much as I hated Captain Marvel and feel absolutely nothing for Monica Rambeau, I did kind of like the first couple episodes of Ms. Marvel.

I was surprised to see Stephen King post this on X yesterday:

How can a guy so good at writing perverse characters not in the least understand people gloating over a movie's failure? I don't personally feel a desire to gloat over it but I will admit to feeling some relief. It's like an election where people vote with their dollars; maybe Disney will finally get the message audiences can't be taken for granted. You can't manipulate people into liking something just because you release it between, and connect it to, two very popular movies as they did with Captain Marvel.

Critical rhetoric about the tendency to prioritise message over entertaining storytelling has migrated from a small segment of internet personalities into an increasingly wider pool. I'd say that's only part of the problem. I think there's a basically cheap look to the productions and the characters often lack dimension. These are products of the same problem that has plagued Disney since the death of Walt Disney--there are too many cooks in the kitchen and too many of them, as a frustrated Bob Dolman remarked when trying to write the Willow series, don't know what they're doing. So we get things like Quantumania in which Evangeline Lily is cgied into saving the day despite it making no sense on any level. Or the latter portion of the Ms. Marvel series which steered the show away from a somewhat engaging teen superhero story into one where the star herself seemed to become bored by the rushed, brow-beating storytelling congealing around her.

It's frustrating seeing what used to be a a series of, on the whole, effective films turn into a creaky, overburdened sled on which dozens of greedy clowns have tried to cram themselves as it goes downhill. Yeah, it feels kind of good watching it finally crash into a tree.