The Marvels, the sequel to Captain Marvel, has come and gone in the theaters, and with it, a whole number of questions have been raised. The first film was tremendously successful ($1.13 billion in worldwide grosses), but four years later the second film struggled to break $200 million across the globe. It’s the lowest-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe film, displacing 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, which brought in $264 million globally.

When any prominent film disappoints, lots of people fly in to suggest the causes. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, attempted to suggest that the problem was that there were not enough company executives overseeing the production, which simultaneously throws director Nia DaCosta under the bus while offering the generally dubious proposition that movies benefit from more studio interference, not less. The Manosphere wishes to suggest that the problem is that it was aimed at women, a foolish argument considering the success of the first film, not to mention that the highest grossing film of 2023, by a healthy margin, is Barbie.

The true answer is that there is probably no single or even primary reason The Marvels, or any big budget spectacle, flops. Just as lots of factors have to come together for a massive success, including the ineffable “right place, right time, right movie” factor (see, again, Barbie), so do a series of factors have to come together when a film crashes and burns.

With that said, and with the notation that I, for once, was actually looking forward to seeing The Marvels in the theater, in the week leading up to the film’s release, I was also thinking to myself: How much homework do I need to do with this one?

Because, you see, not only was The Marvels a direct sequel to Captain Marvel, it’s a constituent part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which multiple films and television series blend in with each other, refer to each other, and advance the character arcs of each other. The Marvels, in addition to Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, also includes Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). She was a kid in the first film, but is an adult in the sequel, and also has superpowers. How did she get superpowers? For that, you need to watch WandaVision, the Disney+ television series, which also explains what Rambeau was doing in the intervening years.

Good news for me is that I’ve watched WandaVision, so I’m caught up there. So I’m good, right? Nope! There’s also Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) the bubbly teenage Pakistani American who accidentally gained superpowers in a different Disney+ series, Ms. Marvel, a series which, incidentally, ended on a credits scene that feeds directly into the new movie. Well, all right: as it happens, I’ve watched this series too—it was delightful and Vellani’s take on Ms. Marvel is one of the best things about the post-Avengers:Endgame MCU. Caught up!

Or am I? Because there is another Disney+ TV series that branches off of the original Captain Marvel film, featuring key characters from it in new and dramatic circumstances: Secret Invasion. In this one, Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson, a fact I assume you probably knew) has to deal with a Skrull uprising, the Skrull being a race that was assumed at the start of Captain Marvel to be the enemy, is revealed to be something else, and in Secret Invasion may be something else again. I say “may” because I haven’t seen Secret Invasion. Fury is in The Marvels as well, so the question is: What happened in Secret Invasion that has an impact on The Marvels? Does the film take place before or after the TV show?

While we’re at it, The Marvels is a “Phase Five” Marvel property, a phase which started with either the Loki TV series (I’ve seen both seasons) or the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania movie (have not seen) and leans pretty heavily on the character of Kang the Conqueror (played, for now at least, by the legally troubled Jonathan Majors) as the Thanos-level ultimate baddie. Where does The Marvels fall into the chronology here, and how much of that chronology am I supposed to know? Do I need to watch Quantumania and Secret Invasion before The Marvels to make sure I’m up on everything? That’s a lot of homework for just one movie, even one I want to see. I do have other things to do with my life.

Well, that’s just Marvel, you might say, and fair enough—Marvel’s film and TV concerns have their genesis in comic books, which are festooned with crossovers and multiverse-spanning narratives. So let us turn to…Star Wars. The most recent series there is Ahsoka, which tells the story of a former Jedi, played by the reliably watchable Rosario Dawson. Ahsoka is a character who appeared in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, interacted with the title characters, Baby Yoda and Luke Skywalker, and is spun off from there—

(gets note)

—Ah, I am informed here that in fact she’s not from those live action shows, she’s just in them, she’s originally from the animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, which have 11 seasons between them, the latter of which also provided most of the characters who are in Ahsoka, excepting the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), who is in Rebels but originated in a series of Star Wars “Expanded Universe” novels by Timothy Zahn, which are no longer canon, but Thrawn is, because everyone liked him and Zahn wrote a whole new canonical trilogy of books for him, so.

Have I seen The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett? Yes. The Clone Wars and Rebels animated series? No. Which meant that when I started watching Ahsoka there was so much I wasn’t getting, in terms of character backstory, in medias res conflicts and plot elements, that after three episodes I gave up on the series, because I was so acutely aware of all the things I didn’t know. The series stopped being nifty Star Wars fun and started feeling like I was being negged for not being a Star Wars completist, and not being up to date on all the nooks and crannies of the entire Star Wars universe.

I’m calling out Marvel and Star Wars here (both now owned by Disney) but they certainly are not the only franchises that have done this sort of thing, either in the contemporary timeframe—good luck stepping into the Fast & Furious franchise at, say, film 7 or 8—or in the history of cinema. Movie serials and franchises from the 30s and 40s also assumed a certain level of “you already know this” from their audiences: MGM knew that moviegoers were aware that Life Begins for Andy Hardy was the 11th film in the series, not actually the character’s origin story. Nor is it confined to film and TV. Genre literature is packed with book series where it is assumed that you’ve made a lifestyle choice by reading along. Fantasy and science fiction certainly, but also mysteries (Sue Grafton’s “Alphabet” series, which got up to “Y”) and thrillers (Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series), among them.

None of this is going away soon, certainly not from Disney, which even with the box office disappointment of The Marvels has raked in tens of billions of dollars in box office grosses from the Star Wars and Marvel films, and even more money from licensing, merchandising and streaming subscription fees (expect, by the way, for The Marvels to do just fine as a Disney+ exclusive). Nor should it go away, especially at a time when (at least in Disney-owned work), the properties are becoming more diverse in front of, and behind, the camera. The problem is not the sprawling nature of these universes. The problem is how much effort the companies creating the universes think is acceptable to ask fans to make in order to enjoy them.

We are nerds, and more than slightly obsessive—all the minutiae of created universes are our jam. But there’s a difference between salting in easter eggs to reward the faithful, and requiring hours of prep work—or at least the willingness to locate a wiki and dive in. And even the nerds have limits. I am a nerd by inclination and by profession—but I’m also a 54-year-old human who lives in the world and who requires at least some of my time and brain slots remain open for other things, like family and work and sleep and domain knowledge in other areas relevant to my life.

What I most want from any franchise or series—and what I try to provide within the context of my own long-running series—is incluing: The awareness that not everyone is or can be up on all the details and thus it is incumbent on the creators to offer it at the time, in a way that is hopefully both entertaining, and not damaging to the story currently being told. Which is not easy! But also, not so difficult that it can’t be done.

(Indeed, it has been done, in the Star Wars universe, no less: See Andor, which despite centering on an existing character in the Star Wars universe, and featuring others that have cropped up elsewhere, feels self-contained and organically its own thing even while it exists in the larger context of the universe.)

Disney’s cultural hegemony is a thing, and yet even that company must realize at this point that the sprawl of these universes is now a barrier to entry. If you can’t keep up, you won’t keep up. More stories is good. It also requires better story management. With great franchise power comes great franchise responsibility. Being lazy with this loses engagement. Disney in particular can lose a lot of engagement before it begins to hurt, sure. But as The Marvels show us, when it finally happens, the drop-off is not exactly trivial.

Again, this is only a single factor in a series of factors that led to The Marvels’ box office performance being what it is. But if Bob Iger and Disney want to actually dig into the reasons for this drop-off, this should be the place, rather than suggesting that what their films need more of, is middle management.

© 2024 John Scalzi