Star Wars is responsible for Marvel's biggest problem

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 15 seconds ago

There have been countless think pieces and social media posts about what caused the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the most common complaints boils down to the fact that many shows and movies seem be homework. Disney seems to expect fans to soak up all the ancillary media to simply understand its latest releases. More often than not, it doesn't really tell a complete story, because the newer content spends too much time setting up what's next. It's a frustrating approach to blockbuster storytelling, and we can blame George Lucas and his approach to the Star Wars prequels for Marvel's decline.

How Star Wars did its homework for fans

At this point, you're probably asking yourself the obvious question: how could the Star Wars prequels negatively affect the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially when The Phantom Menace was released almost a decade before Iron Man brought the MCU to life? The answer starts with Darth Maula killer new character who, despite his awesome design and instant popularity, only had three lines of dialogue. The public naturally had a lot of questions about his origins and motivations and were invariably told that they needed to read various books and comics to figure out what this guy's problem was.

For the Star Wars prequels, this has become a persistent problem, which Disney would recur with Marvel after purchasing the franchise set in a galaxy far, far away. You had to read outside media to learn about other villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous, and reading books and comics was also the only way to learn about equally crucial relationships like the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and the marriage between Padme Amidala and the future Darth Vader. It was, frankly, incredibly lazy storytelling, built on the assumption that hungry fans wouldn't be bothered by the expensive and time-consuming homework associated with additional reading.

Marvel has its own homework

Now Disney has purchased Star Wars, meaning it's owned by the same monolithic studio that owns Wonder. Unsurprisingly, Disney has replicated the previous problem of giving the audience homework, hoping you'll dig into outside media to explain major plot details like the rise of the First Order, Kylo Ren's fall to the dark side and why the Resistance is separated from the government they are trying to protect. What was surprising, however, was that Disney started taking this approach of making fans do their homework with their other successful IP.

With the launch of Disney+, the House of Mouse has adopted a variation (so to speak) of the homework strategy. Instead of encouraging fans to turn to books and comics to fully understand the new films, they wanted fans to watch Disney+ shows instead. Now you have to watch WandaVision understand both Doctor Strange and the multiverse of madness And Agatha throughout. You have to watch Loki to understand who the big bad guy is Quantum that's just how you should look Ms. Marvel to understand who the hell this new character is The wonders East.

The irony is that fans acted like this was yet another boring storytelling decision on Disney's part, but the reality is that they simply applied George Lucas' boring homework strategy to Marvel . Honestly, they had every reason to expect this strategy to work…because as frustrating as these prequels were, fans really flocked to stores to buy ancillary media and get a good handle on these new films set in a galaxy far, far away. But that was because we haven't had any new Star Wars cinematic content since Return of the Jedi in 1983; this strategy didn't work for Marvel because Disney released so much stuff very early, effectively creating superhero fatigue that now threatens their bottom line.

There you have it, folks: Whether fans of either franchise want to admit it, Star Wars inadvertently helped create Marvel's biggest problem. And given that the only way to solve this problem is for Disney to focus less on profit and more on telling great stories, this problem isn't going away anytime soon. Soon, the MCU as a whole might look a bit like Logan's skeletal body: a pretty corpse dead Pool can play with it whenever Disney needs a sure-fire box office hit.