Avengers Endgame Directors Discredit Superhero Fatigue As Reason Behind Marvel’s Recent Failure

The Russo Brothers recently attended the Sands: International Film Festival in St Andrews, Scotland. The director duo addressed a variety of topics related to their diverse professional backgrounds. They spoke about the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it is now, their experience working on Avengers: Endgame, and the superhero fatigue that some moviegoers are feeling. Joe Russo added that Marvel's current problems are all related to viewers' evolving preferences as a result of the way people across the world are consuming information these days and not superhero fatigue. 

Russo Brothers on superhero fatigue 

In a conversation with GamesRadar, the Russo Brothers were asked about the decline of the MCU or whether it is because of superhero fatigue, to which the duo replied negatively. Addressing the concern, Joe said that it is a transitional time and people don't know quite yet how they're going to receive stories moving forward. He also pinned it on the ‘generational divide’ among the audience. 

The filmmaker said, “There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theatre on a certain date to see something, but it’s ageing out. Meanwhile, the new generation ‘I want it now, I want to process it now,’ then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time.”

Anthony chimed in saying that concerns of "superhero fatigue" had been made for a long time but the genre had proven its critics wrong by reinventing itself. He said, “The superhero fatigue question was around long before the work we were doing. So, it's sort of an eternal complaint, like we always used to cite this back in our early days with superhero work. People used to complain about westerns in the same way but they lasted for decades and decades and decades. They were continually reinvented and brought to new heights as they went on."

MCU’s phase five in hot waters

The biggest complaint about the current MCU revolves around how similar the films feel to one another and how the emphasis on spectacle over story has seriously hurt the MCU, particularly as Marvel's VFX department has experienced numerous behind-the-scenes troubles. The biggest example of Marvel's predicament is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which had the lowest box office earnings in the Ant-Man franchise despite all the hype leading up to its release.