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 has caused the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and one of the most common complaints boils down to many shows and films feeling like homework. Disney seems to expect fans to soak up every bit of ancillary media to simply understand its latest releases. More often than not, this doesn’t really tell a complete story because the newest content spends too much time setting up what comes next. It’s a frustrating approach to blockbuster storytelling, and we can blame George Lucas and his approach to the Star Wars prequels pretty directly for Marvel’s decline.

How Star Wars Made Homework For Fans

At this point, you’re probably asking the obvious question: how could the Star Wars prequels negatively affect the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially when The Phantom Menace came out almost a decade before Iron Man brought the MCU to life? The answer starts with Darth Maul, a killer new character who, despite his awesome design and instant popularity, only had three lines of dialogue. Audiences understandably had plenty of questions about his origins and motivations and were invariably told they had to go read various books and comics to piece together what this guy’s whole deal was.

For the Star Wars prequels, that became a persistent problem, one that Disney would replicate with Marvel after buying the franchise set in a galaxy far, far away. You had to read outside media to learn crucial lore about other villains like Count Dooku and General Grievous, and reading books and comics was also the only way to learn more about equally crucial relationships such as the friendship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and the marriage between Padme Amidala and future Darth Vader. It was, frankly, insanely lazy storytelling built on the assumption that ravenous fans wouldn’t mind the expensive and time-consuming homework of extra reading.

Marvel Gets Its Own Homework

Now, Disney has bought Star Wars, which means it is owned by the same monolithic studio that owns Marvel. Unsurprisingly, Disney has replicated the prequel problem of assigning audiences homework, hoping that 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 separate from the government that they work to protect. What was surprising, though, is that Disney began applying this approach of making fans do homework with their other blockbuster IP.

With the launch of Disney+, the House of Mouse adopted a Variant (so to speak) of the homework strategy. Instead of encouraging fans to mainline books and comics to fully understand new films, they wanted fans to watch Disney+ shows instead. Now, you have to watch WandaVision to understand both Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Agatha All Along. You have to watch Loki to understand who the Big Bad of Quantumania is, just as you have to watch Ms. Marvel to understand who the heck this new character in The Marvels is.

The irony is that fans acted like this was an annoying new storytelling decision by Disney, but the reality is that they simply applied George Lucas’ annoying homework strategy to Marvel. Honestly, they had every reason to expect this strategy to work…for as frustrating as those prequels were, fans really did flock to stores to buy ancillary media and fully understand these new films set in a galaxy far, far away. But that was because we hadn’t had new cinematic Star Wars content since Return of the Jedi in 1983; that strategy didn’t work for Marvel because Disney released so much so soon, effectively creating the superhero fatigue now threatening their bottom line.

There you have it, folks: whether fans of either franchise want to admit it, Star Wars helped inadvertently create Marvel’s biggest problem. And considering the only way to fix it is for Disney to focus less on profit and more on telling great stories, that problem won’t go away anytime soon. Pretty soon, the MCU as a whole might be a bit like Logan’s skeletal body: a pretty corpse Deadpool gets to play with whenever Disney needs a safe box office hit.