Marvel Didn't Get Tired. It Got Drowned — by Its Own Parent Company.

In 2019, Avengers: Endgame did $2.799 billion at the box office and briefly held the record for the highest-grossing film ever made.¹² Four years later, a Marvel movie called The Marvels opened, earned $206.1 million worldwide — the lowest in the franchise's history — and lost roughly $237 million.² Same studio. Same superheroes. Same logo before the trailer. The explanation everyone reached for was elegant and wrong: superhero fatigue. The audience, the story went, had simply gotten tired of capes.

The trouble with that story is that the people running Marvel don't believe it. They have said, on the record, something far more uncomfortable: they made too much. The slump wasn't a genre dying. It was a company drowning its own product — and the order to flood the market came from upstairs.

The flywheel ran on scarcity — and they took the scarcity away

For its first three phases, the Marvel machine worked on a simple, brutal scarcity. A handful of theatrical films a year, each one an event you had to leave the house for, each one mandatory viewing if you wanted the next one to make sense. That was the trick: a serialized story so tightly woven that missing an installment meant falling behind, delivered slowly enough that anticipation could build between them. The gap between movies was a feature, not a bug. Absence is what made the appointment feel like an appointment.

Then came Disney+. Phase Four didn't add a few more films — it added a television network. In 2021 alone, Marvel released four movies and five TV shows; across Phase Four it shipped eight Disney+ series, a structural break from the theatrical-only logic of everything before it.⁶ Suddenly the franchise wasn't a slow drip of events. It was a firehose. And the homework got longer: to follow a film, you increasingly needed to have watched the shows, which meant the casual moviegoer — a significant share of that $2.8 billion audience — now faced a syllabus. The thing that made the appointment special was that you couldn't have it all the time. Disney decided to serve it all the time.

This was a mandate, and the man at the top owned it

The most revealing detail isn't the volume — it's who chose it. This wasn't Marvel Studios chasing more stories to tell. It was a corporate streaming strategy. Disney+ needed content to justify subscriptions and slow the cash burn, and Marvel was the most reliable content engine the company owned. So the engine was told to run hot. Feige has been direct about where the push came from. In a 2025 Variety interview he said: "Suddenly, there's a mandate to make more" — and separately described it as "a big company push," drawing a clear line between the corporate directive and Marvel's own creative instincts.⁹ The cannibalization wasn't an accident of overconfidence. It was a deliberate trade: feed the streaming platform now, and pay for it later in the theatrical premium you've been quietly spending down.

By July 2023, the CEO said the quiet part into a microphone. Bob Iger admitted that Marvel's expansion into more films and Disney+ series had 'diluted focus and attention.'³ Read that phrase like an operator: attention is the product Marvel actually sells. The movies are just the vehicle. When you flood a market with the vehicle, you don't multiply the attention — you divide it. Every show competing for the same fan's evening is a show competing with the next film's opening weekend. They built a flywheel that ran on scarcity, then loaded it with so much mass that it stalled under its own weight.

Isn't this just genre fatigue with a nicer name?

The honest objection is that 'we made too much' is exactly what a studio would say to avoid admitting the audience moved on. Maybe the executives are spinning a strategic story over a cultural fact. It's a fair challenge — and the evidence cuts against it. If the public had genuinely tired of the genre, a rival superhero film couldn't have opened well in 2025. James Gunn's Superman did — crossing $500 million globally within weeks of release. Feige's own read on it was blunt: "Look at Superman, it's clearly not superhero fatigue."¹⁰ The capes still sell. What stopped selling was a brand that had taught its own fans the next chapter could wait, because there was always another one streaming.

And watch what Marvel actually did, because behavior is the real confession. It didn't pivot to a new genre or apologize for superheroes. It cut the supply. Feige said at the end of 2024 that the studio was going from four movies and four series a year down to roughly two movies and three series.⁴ Iger drew the same line — fewer films, fewer shows.³ Disney's total content spending fell to $27.2 billion in fiscal 2023, down from $29.9 billion the year before.⁷ You don't fix a tired genre by making less of it. You fix overproduction that way. The cure tells you the disease.

Marvel was never selling movies. It was selling the feeling that you had to be there — that the room would be talking about this on Monday and you didn't want to be the one who hadn't seen it. That feeling was manufactured by restraint, by the gap between releases, by the discipline of showing up only a few times a year and making every appearance count. Disney looked at the most powerful scarcity engine in entertainment and decided what it really needed was more throughput. It got the throughput. It spent the scarcity. And now it's buying the scarcity back, one canceled show at a time — discovering, the expensive way, that the thing it had been printing was never film. It was wanting.