Is Marvel’s ‘Cure’ For Superhero Fatigue Fewer Releases?

Last year seemed like it was a never-ending cycle of superhero movies and TV shows being pumped out. Sure, one can argue that most superhero movies generate big headlines and obviously big money, but does "superhero fatigue" mean anything to these big companies?

Many people define superhero fatigue as people claiming to be bored of superhero content because there is just too much content. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, unfortunately, got caught up in this, especially last year. The animated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (from Sony) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 both came out last year. Following Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

It's worth mentioning that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 crushed it at the box office. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. That same year, DC Comics also had a few movies come out. These include Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom and Shazam!. This doesn’t even include the shows that came out.

Variety reported that Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company is “shrinking the MCU” with a new mission to drop the number of Marvel TV series to two a year and the film output to no more than three movies per year.

Iger said this is part of Disney’s overall strategy to reduce output and focus on quality, a strategy “that’s particularly true with Marvel.”

Marvel Studios Co-President Louis D’Esposito and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige are addressing the rough patch the studio has been through over the last few years.

“If we just stayed on top, that would have been the worst thing that could have happened to us,” D’Esposito said in an interview with Empire. “We took a little hit, we’re coming back strong.”

He continued, “Maybe when you do too much, you dilute yourself a little bit. We’re not going to do that anymore. We learned our lesson. Maybe two to three films a year and one or two shows, as opposed to doing four films and four shows.”

The most recent release calendar distributed by Disney has four films from Marvel Studios slated for 2025. These include Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, The Fantastic Four, and Blade, and four more Marvel movies slated for 2026, including the fifth Avengers movie.

Marvel is releasing a single film in 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine. Historically, the only time Marvel has released more than three movies in a year was in 2021, after the studio sat out 2020 due to the pandemic. The year after they released Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, the latter of which was a co-production with Sony Pictures.

On the TV side, Iger says that a portion of the upcoming series, a slate that includes the Kathryn Hahn-led WandaVision spinoff Agatha, set for release are “a vestige of basically a desire in the past to increase volume,” as reported by Variety.

This year, DC only has one live-action movie releasing which is Joker: Folie à Deux, a sequel to 2019’s Joker. And streaming service Max will also feature The Penguin live-action spinoff series set in the world of The Batman.

Unfortunately, many superhero movies over the last year have struggled to deliver at the box office. The Marvels, the follow-up to 2019’s Captain Marvel starring Brie Larson, had the franchise’s worst-ever opening weekend box office, with $47 million domestically.

Fans have pointed out “shoddy” special effects in Ant-Man: Quantumania and other Marvel features and series.

And then there's Jonathan Majors, the villain in the Loki series, and Quantumania, who is meant to be a huge part of future films but was found guilty of misdemeanor assault and harassment in a split verdict. Forbes reported that Marvel’s current plan is to keep Kang around as the villain of Avengers 5, which was previously called The Kang Dynasty.

Variety reported that Marvel‘s Thor: Love and Thunder was a box office hit with $760 million worldwide, but a lot of Marvel fans were turned off by writer-director Taika Waititi’s silly humor and the film’s “unappealing visual effects.”

The Thor actor himself, Chris Hemsworth, is aware of the negativity around his fourth Thor movie, and he even admitted in a new GQ magazine profile that Love and Thunder was “too silly” for its own good.

Some can point out that many of Marvel's movies and TV shows became confusing to fans once the multiverse got involved. One minute you're looking at one universe that you're familiar with and another moment you're engaging in unfamiliar territory. So, when you continue to add more, one can easily get lost in it all.

Sony’s Madame Web also made headlines for being a miss. According to Forbes, it has been described as “the worst Spider-Man film,” the “worst superhero film of all time,” and “one of the worst films ever made.”

If Marvel and DC get their superhero stuff together, 2025 might finally see an end to superhero fatigue. If they give fans the movies we want and expect, the ones Marvel and DC are good at making, people will watch as many as they can churn out.

The Secret Invasion is over. But the story of the Skrulls will continue. The gritty spy series came to a close with Episode 6 on Wednesday (July 26). With plenty of deaths and a declaration of war, we have received answers that have long been on our mind since Secret Invasion started six weeks ago.

Gravik (Kinglsey Ben-Adir) meets with Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in an abandoned radioactive power plant. Fury is in bad shape, coughing and weakened. Gravik finally puts all his cards on the table for Fury. He has been so fed up with how Fury didn't hold up his end of the bargain in finding a new home for the Skrulls all this time. For Fury, he tells him it's "it’s easier to save the lives of eight billion people than it is to change their hearts and minds" about the Skrulls. Post-Blip, Fury admits that he felt relief when he "flaked off" in the Blip (as seen in the post-credit scene in Avengers: Infinity War). He was tired of fighting and finally found a way out. He wasn't the same brave Fury he once was, but the only reason he came back to Earth was for Gravik.

Fury felt responsible for Gravik since he was the youngest Skrull on his team. Because he failed him and his people, Fury brought Gravik what he's been after -- the Harvest. The Harvest contains Carol Danvers' (Brie Larson) DNA along with the blood of several Avengers, as well as Thanos's forces. Gravik's team collected it at the scene of the final battle in Avengers: Endgame, where everyone spilled blood. Fury wanted to make an exchange: go to some other planet and wipe out some other species. "I don’t give a damn," Fury tells Gravik. "Just leave Earth the hell alone and leave it now. Call off the strike and save your people.”

Meanwhile, President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) is still in the hospital. With Rhodey (Don Cheadle) in his ear, pressuring the declaration of war against Russia, Sonya (Olivia Colman) intervenes. She gives Rhodey a call to warn him that Fury has lost his mind and is coming for the President. After Gravik takes the vial and tests its legitimacy, he activates it to absorb its powers with Fury in the chamber with him. Only Fury turns out to be G'iah, who has also taken the Harvest. Both of them now have incredible powers. As the two battle to the death, Sonya's warning of Fury coming actually happens. Since Ritson is dazed and confused about who to trust, a standoff leaves the real Fury no choice but to kill the fake Rhodey and expose him as a Skrull.

Once Fury returns to his destroyed home, he apologizes to Priscilla (Charlyne Woodard) for not being there for her. She asks him again if he loves her or "the face that puts you at ease." Fury reassures her that he loves her and wants one last chance because now he's leaving. Without hesitation, Priscilla says goodbye. Wondering if she can ever find a way to forgive him, she keeps a cool head and says she knows where to find him.

G'iah has now acquired all these special abilities, piquing Sonya's interest. She meets her and offers her resources; the Skrulls will need her, now that President Ritson has declared war on them. Sonya says she's "a friend of a friend," and her people need a leader. Of course, G'iah's defenses are up because of what happened to Talos (Ben Mendelsohn). Sonya suggests they "leave love and friendship out of it," unlike Talos and Fury. Instead, they will use each other so they can both be safe.

Closing the episode, Fury appears in front of a misty field with a bright beam of light shining through the center, which is how we saw him early in the series. Priscilla arrives and tells him she's going by her birth name now: Varra. Fury gives her good news from S.A.B.E.R.: the Kree are open to peace talks with the Skrulls. Not trusting this this, Varra says, "Kree make peace. Reminds me of that old joke. What do Skrulls call good luck? Bad luck." Despite that, Fury wants Varra's help in becoming the Skrull diplomat. "We’re better together," He says. "Well, at least I am.” He wants her to come with him, and she agrees, shifting into her Skrull form. The two profess their love for each other as they are and board the spaceship hand in hand. This sets things up for the upcoming The Marvels film, due out on November 10.

All six episodes of Secret Invasion are now streaming on Disney+. Keep scrolling below to see how the series changed the Marvel Universe.

When "Fury" (G'iah) meets with Gravik in the reactor room, Gravik unloads all his disappointments in Fury. We see another side to Gravik, who feels remorse for taking the face that he's wearing on Fury's orders. Fury promised the Skrulls a home and he failed to deliver that. Gravik said after every person he's killed, it took a little piece of his heart. For thirty years, Talos "wandered in the shadows" because he was weak, and Gravik didn't want to put his trust in Fury. Now, he blames Fury for the bombs, blackouts, massacres, wildfires, and the "imminent removal of humans from their habitat." His words shot through Fury as he tells him humans were condemned to die the day he realized he wasn't a man of his word. And Fury completely agrees that he failed him. After searching a few years of being unable to find a planet out there for the Skrulls to call home, Fury's only solution to holding out his end of the bargain was trying to build them a home here on Earth.

G'iah now has the powers of lots of heroes and villains. When we see Gravik reading that the blood of Captain America, Gamora, Thanos, Captain Marvel, Abomination, Mantis, Cull Obsidian, Drax, Korg, Hulk, Thor Odinson, Valkyrie, Winter Soldier, are in the vial, he says,  “It’s pure. You really wanna die.” After he turns the machine on to merge with the powers, Gravik's Skrull form attacks Fury, but he blocks the punch with what turns out to be Hulk's arm and punches him into oblivion. We then see it's not really Fury, but G’iah. “You killed my mother. My father,” she says to Gravik. The two have an epic fight using these new powers and she stabs him in the chest with an ice arm. They use Captain Marvel's powers to go airborne, and after Gravik thinks she's knocked out, G'iah uses Mantis' powers to make him sleep and crash head first back down. After G'iah rocks the classic superhero landing to end the battle, he says she’s just like her father. Just like “them," she corrects him and blasts a huge hole through Gravik, killing him.

Following her battle with Gravik, G'iah goes back to the Skrull compound to free the hostages. Among them is the real Rhodey and Agent Ross (Martin Freeman). G'iah tells a weakened Rhodey that he's been held hostage “for a long time.” But how long? Rhodey's personality was obviously changed in Secret Invasion, but it's hard to tell how long the Skrulls that took over him and Ross were impersonating them. Has Rhodey been a Skrull since the first Iron Man? Does he know anything about superheros? Was it ever him in the War Machine armor? Does he know that Tony Stark is dead? Have we ever known the real Ross? Was the ally of the Wakandians a Skrull the whole time? Was Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine married to and divorced from a Skrull (and if so, did she know it? She seems to know everything).

When Ritson addresses the American people about the motorcade attack, he reveals it was solely the work of the shape-shifting, alien-born species known as Skrulls. He reveals he will be presenting to Congress for immediate emergency authorization to designate all “off-world born species enemy combatants.” He then declared: “We know who you are. We know how to find you. And we will kill every last one of you.” With this kind of call-to-arms, he's making the dire mistake of not distinguishing between those who want to leave peacefully and those who don't. Following his announcement, Fury tells Ritson he took a bad situation and made it worse. “That’s real one-term-President stuff. But we have to act now.” As people are getting dropped for being Skrulls, Fury warns that the President's "hit squads" are now inspired to kill the Skrulls who still want to help them. They are killing innocent people of power with no proof they are a Skrull, or putting themselves in danger of getting killed off by the real Skrulls. Ritson tells Fury that if he wants the Skrulls saved, he's got to get them off his planet. With this war launched against Skrulls, will Ritson get killed off or be a one-term President like Fury predicted? In the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World, [inlink id="harrison-ford-general-thaddeus-thunderbolt-ross-captain-america-4" text="Harrison Ford is set to play President Thunderbolt Ross"], so it's got to be one of those two outcomes.