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In 2023, Marvel Studios took a year off from the hype house that geeks built, San Diego Comic-Con. So did basically everybody else: Between the writers’ and actors’ strikes and general production delays all around, Hollywood didn’t have much to show at SDCC last year, and the actors and writers who’d normally be the center of any presentation were busy on the picket lines.
In 2024, Marvel Studios is back in Hall H, with big plans on the horizon — the biggest in the half-decade since the release of Avengers: Endgame, though it’s coming after half a decade of erosion in the MCU’s cultural dominance. Can Marvel reclaim its status as cinema’s biggest hype machine? Sure it can, and here’s how.
Marvel, the business
A Marvel Studios Hall H panel is a brand presentation dressed up as a concert event. So it’s cynical and unsexy to say, but the bottom line is Marvel has to look like it’s going to make shareholders oodles of money between now and the next San Diego Comic-Con. After a string of Marvel box-office disappointments, from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to Eternals, that isn’t a guarantee.
Marvel is coming off its worst box-office returns ever for a mainline MCU film, and the conviction on charges of assault and harassment of the cornerstone actor of its current phase. And then there’s just general Hollywood woes — inflation, macroeconomic insecurity, the theater industry’s slow post-2020 recovery.
Of the four MCU films scheduled for 2025, one has undergone extensive reshoots and rewrites; another has been in pre-production limbo since its announcement in 2019; one is a low-buzz villain feature; and one is a tantalizing potential new start, but based on a franchise associated with three iterations of Hollywood boondoggles. The promised 2026 return of an Avengers-style teamup film looks rockier than any of them, having been scrubbed of its title and divested of its villain.
The first thing Marvel needs to do is project that’s it’s a movie studio with a confident, competent plan — one that responds to events beyond its control.
Marvel, the franchise
Second, that plan needs to seem like it’s gonna tell an interesting story.
After the upheaval of pandemic and strike delays, of declining streaming revenue, and the MCU’s first (unforced) year-long hiatus, what is the shape of the MCU, narratively? Are we recasting Kang, to try and make fetch happen one more time? Are we pivoting to Doom? What’s the new name of the Russos’ Avengers 5? Where is all this going?
The Infinity Stones were an irresistible font of speculation and investigation for fans, and a set of MacGuffins that could be slotted into pretty much any traditionally structured screenplay. It would be difficult for anything that followed to recapture their utility as an interconnected cinematic storytelling tool — but if the post-Endgame MCU has proven anything, it’s that Kang was not it.
The time-traveling man and his literal infinity of disconnected multiversal identities flopped as connective tissue and failed as a concrete menace. So is Marvel picking up the pieces to put them back together? Or is it pivoting? If the company wants to lure in anyone besides the dwindling ranks of MCU diehards, it needs to bring the answer to these questions to Hall H.
Marvel, the creative studio
Marvel’s last five years of output has been defined by a marked decline in quality from a studio that was once known for improbably consistent output. There was a time when an MCU project was reliably a solidly good time at the movies — if not a masterpiece, then never a complete dud.
There were signs that was changing as early as Eternals, but 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was barely a finished film. The Marvels arrived heavily scarred from re-editing. And Secret Invasion… well, who remembers Secret Invasion? Marvel Studios spent 2023 bombing, and 2024 silent.
If the studio wants to reclaim the eyeballs of anyone outside the hallowed walls of Hall H, it won’t be enough to reveal a new slate of titles and dangle a new Avengers storyline. Marvel has to show that there’s creative life left in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Is the MCU still a place where filmmakers have space to bring their own vision to the screen, and the studio support to do it well? Is it the company that had room for James Gunn and John Watts to put their stamp on Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man trilogies? Or is it the company that’s spent four years trying to find anyone to make Blade? The company where “fix it in post” is synonymous with visual effects studio crunch, burnout, and bankruptcy? Is it a place where Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s deeply meaningful tribute to Chadwick Boseman is hemmed in on all sides by franchise concerns? Where the comedy niche of an Ant-Man movie is sacrificed on the altar of Kang? Where a charming little story like The Marvels is axed into incomprehensibility in the edit?
Even Marvel’s money machine needs to show it cares about putting great movies in front of the audience, because the studio’s competitors are coming up hard. 2025 will be the dawn of Warner Bros.’ new, purposefully disconnected DC Comics film slate, overseen by no less than James Gunn, director of Marvel’s single unequivocal success of 2023.
Marvel Studios isn’t down for the count — there are far too many very smart people within its halls. But will those smart people make it to the stage? One way or another, the future of the MCU begins this Saturday in Hall H.
