The Secret Formula For Attracting Adults Back To Superhero Movies

It’s no secret that superheroes have lost their punching power in movie theaters. Since 2020, just one of Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies has grossed more than $1 billion at the box office compared to five in the previous five years which is also when the last DC Comics film passed that threshold. There is good reason for this decline and there may also be a simple solution.

With 36 movies under its belt, the MCU dominates the superhero landscape and essentially reinvented the genre with the release of 2008’s Iron Man. What made the movie particularly innovative is that it grounded its characters in the real world.

Tony Stark, the billionaire businessman who becomes the armored Avenger, listens to AC/DC and has a Shelby Cobra 427 in his garage. At one point in the movie, famed CNBC stock picker Jim Cramer is shown on a television railing about the performance of Stark’s company whilst CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour comments on it in the 2010 sequel.

Further blurring the line between fact and fiction, at a cocktail party in the sequel Stark bumps into tech-titan Larry Ellison and races a car in the Monaco Historic Grand Prix, a real-life auto race for gentlemen drivers. There, he meets Elon Musk in the American Bar of Monaco’s most famous bolthole, the Hotel de Paris.

Crucially, the Iron Man movies dispensed with traditional superhero tropes like secret identities and gaudy costumes. As a result Marvel Studios became a magnet for top talent. Challenging conventions, the studio’s president Kevin Feige hired a heavyweight cast for Iron Man including Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Downey Jr and Jeff Bridges. The studio didn’t even cut corners on unseen actors with Britain’s Paul Bettany voicing Iron Man’s artificial intelligence system.

The movies were a hit with adults as they treated cherished characters from their childhood seriously. In turn, this enabled parents to enjoy the movies with their own children thereby fueling the MCU machine. Audiences lapped it up and Marvel’s owner Disney capitalized on this with intensive iteration leading to sequel after sequel. It had several tricks up its sleeve to maintain audience interest.

Each MCU movie was initially inspired by a different genre of film. Ant-Man was a heist movie, Guardians of the Galaxy was a sci-fi flick whilst Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a tense political thriller. This gave each movie its own style and ensured there would be variety in the content. That’s not all.

Cleverly, Feige gave Marvel’s movies an interconnected storyline which meant that fans had to watch all of them to follow what was going on. The studio made the most of this by commissioning team-up films featuring characters from multiple movies. It was a dream ticket.

In 2012, The Avengers became the first MCU movie to cross the $1 billion mark, and six years later, Avengers: Infinity War earned double that, setting a new record for the superhero series. DC tried to copy this connective tissue but didn’t share in the MCU’s success thanks to the dark setting and ponderous plots of its movies.

It was inevitable that the curtain would eventually come down on Marvel’s winning streak as Disney’s former chief executive Michael Eisner explained to this author in 2019. “There will be a moment in time when nobody wants to go see a Marvel movie again and I’m sure that Disney knows that and they won’t want to go see a Warner Bros. DC movie,” he said in an interview for the Mail on Sunday.

In the end, the MCU was a victim of its own success as the more movies Marvel made, the harder it was to maintain quality standards. This problem was compounded by the pandemic as remote working made it much tougher to supervise productions as Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger revealed in 2023.

Iger was talking at the New York Times DealBook summit soon after the release of The Marvels, which to this day stands as the lowest-grossing MCU movie with takings of just $206.1 million. He explained that as “The Marvels was shot during Covid, there wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what’s being done day after day after day.”

At the same time, Marvel was put under pressure as it had to increase its output of streaming shows on the Disney+ platform to cater for consumers who were locked down indoors craving new content. “For the first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” Feige told Variety. It yielded a total of 16 Marvel Studios streaming series and as the pandemic receded this volume became more of a burden than a benefit.

When consumers returned to work they didn’t have time to watch as much television as before so they skipped episodes of Marvel shows. This made some of them worried that they wouldn’t understand the next episode which created a vicious circle as the more they missed, the less they watched. The situation got so bad that Marvel had to put disclaimers at the start of some of its shows saying that prior knowledge was not required to understand them. Of course by the time that was necessary, Marvel was fighting a losing battle.

With less time on their hands, consumers started canceling streaming subscriptions just as Marvel’s massive stream of content began being broadcast. In order to produce so many shows, Marvel had to mine the depths of its archives which led to productions based on obscure characters that many fans didn’t care about.

A case in point is 2021’s Eternals which is named after a team of human-looking aliens from the planet Olympia who were supposedly genetically engineered to be perfect and had been hiding on earth for centuries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it grossed just $402.1 million at the box office.

Marvel’s surging content pipeline led to an explosion in its costs putting even more pressure on the studio to deliver at the box office. In order to increase its chances, Feige tried to appeal to as wide an audience as possible by making Marvel’s movies more inclusive. This led to it introducing superheroes who are deaf, Chinese and Muslim representing a diverse cross-section of society.

Covering all bases also involved aiming Marvel movies more at children. Feige took a tremendous gamble with this strategy as although superhero fatigue was setting in with adults, the success of the MCU had been built on their support.

Although the change in tone was unofficial, it was noticeable. Since it began, kiddie crime fighters have featured prominently in five MCU streaming shows and there is even talk of them teaming up in a Young Avengers movie. “Potentially,” Feige said to Variety. “In that case, it comes down to where’s the best story and where is the best strange alchemy. Who would be fun to see them with? Each other, because that’s what the Young Avengers are, but also mixing it up more.”

The age of the characters isn’t the only way that the MCU has aimed at a younger audience. The digital appearance of one of the villains in 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was compared to a character from 2003 kids’ film Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over.

In stark contrast to the variety of the original MCU movies, Quantumania featured a space setting which it shared with The Marvels and Thor: Love and Thunder. All three movies were released in the past three years and each only made an average of $481 million at the box office with an average critics score of just 57% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It suggests that Feige’s gamble didn’t pay off as the shift in tone had put off many of the adults who fell in love with the early MCU movies.

In the past two years Marvel has resorted to a number of ploys to tempt them back into movie theaters whilst DC has rebooted its cinematic universe entirely after hiring Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. Superman, the first film in his DC Universe, breaks new ground as it makes no pretence of being set in the real world. Instead looks like a live-action colorful comic book adventure and is currently flying high in the box office with takings of $406.8 million after just 10 days in theaters.

Marvel took a different approach last year with Deadpool & Wolverine, an ultra-violent movie with a meta theme which even mocked the MCU itself. It paid off as Deadpool & Wolverine became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time raking in $1.3 billion at the box office.

Marvel tried to repeat this in May with Thunderbolts* which had a similarly dark theme. Despite earning significant acclaim, with a critics score of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie only made $382.1 million at the box office as its characters aren’t widely known fan-favorites like Deadpool and Wolverine. That isn’t an obstacle with Marvel’s next movie.

Later this week Marvel will launch The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the fifth movie about perhaps its most well-known superhero team. Set in a retro-futuristic 1960s parallel world, the movie looks visually spectacular and the theme seems perfectly-suited to its protagonists. The ’60s were dominated by star-gazing and the space race which are fundamental to the film as the quartet of heroes get their powers when they are exposed to a burst of celestial radiation during a space mission.

The setting makes the movie relatable to adults who grew up in that era and, usefully for Marvel, the events in its parallel world are unconnected to the previous movies. The colorful characters should keep kids engrossed and there are Easter eggs aplenty for comics fans, right down to the parallel world being designated as Earth-828 in a nod to Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby’s birthday on August 28, 1917.

Early reviews suggest that the movie is a return to the MCU’s heydays which could be a double-edged sword. The more successful it is, the more likely it is that a sequel will get made and in turn, the greater the chance that adults could tire of the franchise like they have with many of its counterparts. A solution for Marvel may be simpler than it seems.

In its drive for realism, Marvel and DC appear to have lost one of the most fundamental qualities of comics which attracted so many readers – intrigue. Some of the most memorable storylines in the Spider-Man comics surrounded the secret identities of his villains with one lasting for a massive 14 years from 1983.

The villain in question was the Halloween-themed Hobgoblin, who flies on a horned glider, wears a creepy yellow mask with glowing red eyes which peek out from underneath an orange cowl and cape. The Hobgoblin has a lair in a dark and dingy shed on a peer and for more than a decade his face was only seen shrouded in shadows when he wasn’t wearing his mask.

Until 1997 readers were kept guessing about his secret identity with the Hobgoblin throwing the web slinger, and his alter-ego Peter Parker, off his scent time and time again. On one occasion, the masked marauder even brainwashed Ned Leeds, one of Parker’s closest friends, into acting as his stand-in to fool Spidey when he unmasked him. These tales typically ended on the cliffhanger of readers seeing the Hobgoblin’s actual alter-ego in the shadows saying that he had the last laugh as Spider-Man had caught the wrong man.

In contrast, none of the villains in the MCU have secret identities which keep viewers guessing as to who they are over multiple movies. DC too has missed this opportunity with Superman’s adversary being Lex Luthor who doesn’t even wear a mask. One of his henchmen does but, as is the case in many MCU movies, his identity is revealed by the end of the film.

The closest that Marvel has come to intrigue over a villain’s identity is the question of why its next big baddie Doctor Doom looks like Tony Stark as he is played by Downey Jr. This question is set to be answered in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday so it too isn’t likely to be a plot device which can be used to tempt viewers to watch multiple movies or streaming series. In fact, Marvel appears to be moving away from that model and its timing could be just right.

Talking to Variety about Marvel’s future slate, Feige said that the streaming shows will have increasingly less connection to the feature films so that viewers don’t need to watch them in order to understand what is happening. “Allowing a TV show to be a TV show is what we’re returning to,” he explained. That’s just the start.

When movie-goers watch a film in a theater they accept they will be there for a couple of hours as it is a special occasion. However, clearing more than double that length of time in their own homes to watch a streaming series is a tougher ask now that lives are back to normal after the pandemic. Many people won’t start watching a show if they know it’s unlikely they will have enough time to get through all episodes. The fewer shows they watch, the greater the likelihood they will cancel their subscriptions so studios need to come up with ways to keep them hooked.

One solution is shortening the length of the episodes. For example, each instalment of Murderbot, the acclaimed Apple TV+ series starring Alexander Skarsgård, only runs for between 22 and 34 minutes. However, there were still a total of 10 episodes in the first season, which concluded earlier this month, putting the total running time at more than three and a half hours.

Marvel has come up with a different approach to try and bring back the magic. It has commissioned a series of what it calls Special Presentations, which are each approximately an hour long and play on Disney+. They are set in the MCU, and feature characters from it, but are designed to be standalone stories.

The series kicked off with the noir-themed Werewolf by Night ahead of Halloween in 2022 and was swiftly followed by The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special a month later. A special starring Jon Bernthal as the Punisher is currently in development following the character’s highly-commended debut in the Daredevil streaming series. It is due to be released in 2026 with the next special expected to be based on Sacha Baron Cohen’s demonic Mephisto character who was introduced earlier this month in the finale of Marvel’s Ironheart streaming series.

In the absence of intrigue over villains’ alter-egos, getting consumers to clear an hour of their time with no prior knowledge required could be precisely what Marvel needs to have a happy ending.