Marvel Studios has had some outstanding weekends in its history, but not since the paradigm-shifting debut of 2012’s “The Avengers” has a weekend been more consequential for the company than the most recent one.
On Saturday night, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige opened the company’s presentation at San Diego Comic-Con by announcing that “Deadpool & Wolverine” would have the highest opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie, and that the Marvel Cinematic Universe had just passed more than $30 billion in global box office grosses, the first film franchise ever to reach that milestone by a wide margin. Roughly an hour later, Feige closed the panel with the announcement that Joe and Anthony Russo, who directed the two most recent “Avengers” movies to more than $4.8 billion in worldwide grosses, were returning to the company to direct the next two “Avengers” movies — and that Robert Downey Jr. was also coming back to star in them as Dr. Victor von Doom. In between, Feige presided over presentations of its 2025 film slate, which featured a first look at Harrison Ford as the Red Hulk and the debut of Marvel’s First Family, the Fantastic 4.
It was by any measure an impressive exhibition of Marvel’s singular ability to transform fan enthusiasm into a sense of gleeful inevitability, that slightly lightheaded feeling that of course the studio’s movies will be gargantuan, crowd-pleasing, inescapable cultural phenomenons.
Going into this weekend, however, that reputation had — for the first time in 12 years — become seriously in doubt. The chatter started in February 2023 with the financial and critical disappointment that was “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”; over the ensuing year, the studio weathered a series of glaring blows, often self-inflicted, that led to an abundance of media hand-wringing over superhero fatigue in general and speculation that Marvel specifically had lost its mojo. (This very publication contributed to that chatter.)
These weren’t superficial concerns. Developing the MCU has required each project to be at least a solid success and necessitated a substantial outlay of filmmaking capital, and the film industry at large has come to rely on Marvel as the central engine driving the theatrical marketplace. Going into Comic-Con, Marvel really did need to reaffirm its swagger, to prove 2023 was a momentary ebb rather than the start of an irretrievable decline.
That effort began in earnest on Thursday, July 25, when “Deadpool & Wolverine” stars Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman and director Shawn Levy joined Feige to screen the entire film in Hall H, and then capped off the night with a lengthy fireworks and drone show over the San Diego convention center that screamed, “No one else would dare spend this kind of money to put on this kind of show.” The celebration continued with Saturday’s panel, which opened with a full church choir singing “Like a Prayer” while an army of dancing Deadpools swarmed through the audience. Other studios put on panels at Comic-Con; Marvel put on a show.
The bulk of the panel unfolded like many Marvel Studios presentations at Comic-Con before it: Feige and the moderator (in this case, “Deadpool & Wolverine” costar Rob Delaney) brings out the cast of one of the studios’ upcoming films (“Captain America: New World Order,” “Thunderbolts*” and “The Fantastic 4: First Steps”); the actors stand on stage (rather than sit behind a table) and deliver strategically revelatory answers to questions about what to expect in their movie; and then they present an extended first look at said movie created specifically for Comic-Con to extract the maximum amount of fan anticipation. After repeating this playbook multiple times, Feige then caps the night with a previously unannounced revelation or two (the Russos! Downey! Victor von Doom!) meant to send the audience streaming back into San Diego’s streets, dizzy with nerdy pleasure.
All this pomp and circumstance did paper over some foibles: There was zero mention of the future of “Blade” with Mahershala Ali, which was first announced at Comic-Con five years ago and has since lost two directors. Feige explained, without a great deal of conviction, that the name of the Thunderbolts in “Thunderbolts*” actually has nothing to do with Ford’s character, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. But then he prevented “Thunderbolts*” director Jake Schreier from explaining why the title has an asterisk, which even drew a smattering of boos. And “Brave New World” director Julias Onah couldn’t attend because he contracted COVID — an unfortunate absence given the significant rewrites and reshoots on the film.
More broadly, bringing back Downey and the Russos does represent a kind of creative retrenchment, an admission that Marvel needs to rely on its biggest hitmakers again rather than seek new voices and performers. The euphoria of Downey’s return will fade and leave behind some thorny creative questions, like whether general audiences will be able to accept Downey as a Marvel character who isn’t Tony Stark, or how to justify the MCU’s most famous actor playing an entirely different role that isn’t just “because multiverse.” (On that score, Marvel at least has the unintended precedent of Chris Evans playing Johnny Storm before he played Steve Rogers.)
None of these complications seemed to matter in the slightest inside Hall H, as the audience basked in wave after wave of geek-coded dopamine triggers. Some attendees even started chanting the Russo’s names and Downey’s initials well before their return had been confirmed. On Saturday, Marvel proved that it still knows how to delight its audience better than any other entertainment outfit in the industry. All the studio had to do was get in bed with Deadpool and summon its Doom.
Source Agencies
