This year had already been called Marvel’s annus miserabilis before a Manhattan jury found actor Jonathan Majors guilty of two misdemeanour counts of harassment and assault towards his ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, on Monday.
Now, it’s ending with a damaging disaster for the studio, who stood behind Majors after he was arrested back in March, inviting him to the premiere of Season 2 of Loki despite the accusations of assault by the movement coach who he had met on the set of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Their decision to stand by their man was questioned at the time, as it appeared to prioritise the ambitions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the alleged victim.
Now the man on which the studio had invested so much as the new post-Thanos supervillain, could face up to a year in jail when he’s sentenced in February. Marvel and parent company Disney cut ties with him yesterday after the verdict was announded.
It caps off a year at Marvel which has been marked by internal turmoil and high-profile departures, disappointing receptions for their films and shows, as well as the Majors scandal.
How did it all go wrong for a studio which had been on a $29.8 billion-making hot streak since being bought by Disney in 2009? The one who irritated Martin Scorsese to sniff that, “it wasn’t cinema.”
Well it was, just not auteur cinema, this was a new studio system, where everyone, even maverick directors like Sam Raimi (Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness) and Taika Waititi (Thor: Rangnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder), have to bow to the greater good of the entire universe.
Kevin Feige’s vision when he took over at Marvel Studios President in 2007 was to use the comic template that was its origin and unite the various characters in one overarching universe. Amazingly successful when it’s working harmoniously, but when things start falling apart, a multiverse of awfulness can be the result.
This year had started so positively too, with Feige talking up ‘phase 5’ of the MCU, after what had been a transitional ‘phase 4’, marked by the end of the Avengers and an increase in output – demanded during Covid by Disney chief executive Bob Akers.
That resulted in some quirky gems like Moon Knight, Ms Marvel and She-Hulk (an Ally McBeal-style legal drama so meta that its finale involved the lead character breaking out of the Disney+ home screen to confront the showrunner about the script), but also thin fodder like Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder (even Chris Hemsworth recently admitted the latter was, “a bit silly.”).
“One of the powerful aspects of being at Marvel Studios is having these films and shows hit the zeitgeist,” said Feige, “It is harder to hit the zeitgeist when there’s so much product out there.”
He vowed to have slower, more considered output, though no less ambitious. Built around Majors’ Kang the Conqueror, this would be the multiverse period for Marvel, starting with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
The film had a huge opening weekend, then promptly died, with the box office eventually coming in at under $500 million worldwide, a relative failure.
Subsequently Victoria Alonso was fired as Marvel’s Head of Production and Post-Production. The official reason was that she had broken her contract by working on an Amazon Studios film called Argentina 1985, but her lawyer Patty Glaser put it down to her refusing to “do something she believed was reprehensible,” which insiders said involved her refusing Disney requests to censor gay Pride references in Quantumania for the Kuwait market.
Such in-fighting did not point to a company at its peak, and indeed their yearly September summit in Palm Springs was reported to turn into an "emergency meeting" according to Variety, who said the problems with Majors was the most pressing issue - leading to suggestions Dr Doom could replace Kang as the new big bad buy - but not the only one, as the company dealt with stuttering productions and overstretched teams ("2023 was the straw that broke the camel's back," one former VFX worker was quoted as saying).
Yet one of the key problems was not so much the behind-the-scenes wrangling as the type of story now being made. The much-trumped multiverse exploration in the new phases was fun for the mega-invested ultra fan-boys but a bit hard to get your head around for everyone else.
But its not just that the narratives were becoming increasingly complicated it was that they necessitated a dramatic softening. Within the multiverse, viewers quickly realise that anything can be solved with a little trip to another universe on another timeline. No one really dies, and everyone can be saved.
Quantumania was a fine spectacle but it was never gripping, and the same fate fell across the second season of Loki too. While the first season proved to be a winning vehicle for Tom Hiddleston, playing off against Owen Wilson in a retro-futurist administrative centre which oversaw the multiverse and kept it in order, coming off as equal parts Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and The Office, season two became so complicated, the only way to deal with the episodes was with subtitles and then a furious post-watch study.
All part of the fun, in a sense. And actually the show grew in stature as it went on, culminating in an absolute barn-storming final episode in which Loki’s final fate as a character is revealed.
The other point of redemption should have been the outstanding performance of Jonathan Majors as Victor Timely, one of the variants of Kang, but of course he had already been arrested by the time the show was out, which somewhat dampened the triumphant arrival of this new intended keystone in the MCU.
The reception to Loki was somewhat muted then, but even that was preferable to the reception for Secret Invasion, which preceded it on Disney+. A vehicle for Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury, it was an oddly unwatchable series that tonally veered away from the crowd-pleasing joy that defined Marvel’s output.
You could always rely upon Guardians of the Galaxy on that front. Writer/director James Gunn was another Marvel star leaving the studio, lured away to revamp the DC universe but not before landing the final Guardians film in May.
The much-loved series within the MCU was the high point of Marvel’s year, bringing in $845 million worldwide. However, looking back at it, there was something about the overlong film that suddenly smacked of self-indulgence.
The always too cool for school Guardians had somehow fallen into sentimentality; there’s only so many ‘characters walking in slow motion to a cool/cheesy song’ that audiences can take. It felt like the proper end point of Marvel’s hot streak, meaning things had been stretched far enough and it was right that it was ending.
But the transition to a new hot streak was stuttering and Marvels bad press kept coming. The writer and actor strikes meant Disney head Bob Iger delayed Agatha: Darkhold Diaries (a WandaVision spin off) and Echo (a Hawkeye spin off), and in the midst of it Iger became something of a target for the actors after his comment that the writers and actors striking were “not being realistic.”
It caused Bryan Cranston to memorably respond at a rally: “Mr Iger…I don’t expect you to understand who we are, but we ask you to hear us, and beyond that to listen to us when we tell you, we will not be having our jobs taken away and given to robots!”
What would have been ideal for the studio would have been to have finished the year on a high with the intended crowd-pleaser, The Marvels. But the crowds were not pleased.
Brie Larson as Captain Marvel living up alongside Tevonah Parris from Wandavision and Iman Vellani from Ms Marvel was all lined up to be the moment when the old anti-female fanboy cliches were put to bed, especially given how well received Captain Marvel was.
However, The Marvels was reportedly a troubled production, with numerous reshoots, and expectations became tempered; the usual aggressive marketing push appeared to be missing. The film opened last month with the lowest opening-weekend gross of any MCU movie.
This fumbling of The Marvels has now been followed with the Majors verdict and his ejection from MCU. None of it plays well with the image of the studio as a force of progress alongside a force of box office.
Which begs the question: where does it go from here? The next major film to hit will be Deadpool 3 in May, the first entry of Ryan Reynolds’ character into the official MCU. After that its Captain America: Brave New World’ with Anthony Mackie taking over Cap duties from Chris Evans, before Blade and Fantastic Four lead into the next Avengers film in 2025, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. Already, the title of the latter makes you wince.
Kang will surely be recast, such is the investment of the studio into this character. You can’t imagine Kevin Feige will use the Majors situation to back out of the ill-received multiverse into which he has taken Marvel.
Perhaps, inspiration lies a little closer to home. There was one superhero film that did deliver this year, one that handled a multiverse narrative with clarity and wit, and that had a depth to it in its handling of identity, family and inclusion which felt like genuinely new ground. The film was Sony’s animated Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse, and it is, no exaggeration, a masterpiece.
Made ‘in association with Marvel Studios’ you can imagine the temptation to outright claim it as one of their own to reframe their 2023. But really, this is a studio in need of a superhero or seven to save it, while somewhere in time and space Martin Scorsese, the conqueror, smiles.
