Word came today that Disney is laying off a lot of people across every division except Pixar. This includes not only Marvel Studios but Marvel Comics, the alleged source material for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Of course, little of this are the higher ups or redundant, unnecessary, or just plain fake divisions or their heads, though some of the names in those two articles are rather surprising given their role in the company and their respective branches.
What happened to Marvel? Often the more dominant of the “Big Two” companies that have had the biggest influence on comics, the Carnegie Hall of comic companies along with DC, now the comics aren’t doing so well. If it wasn’t for DC and other crossovers as well as Spider-Man relaunches and the soon to end Ultimate Spider-Man ver. 2, they wouldn’t even be on the top 50 for 2025, or at least not doing as well. Marvel Comics might not be dead, but they aren’t in great condition.
Meanwhile Marvel Studios is putting out more flops in theaters and Disney+ than hits. Fans of these characters mock them, then get attacked by creators so sure that their version is superior to the comics, as if that matters. While the Comics problem started before Disney, the movies definitely fell off after Disney.
It’s so easy to identify what went wrong that I’m hardly the first to do so. I just want to get something current in this week, and this is it. So what did they do wrong, what will they probably continue to do wrong, and what can we learn from all this? After all, Marvel specifically and Disney in general aren’t learning a lousy thing.
I wish we’d stop calling this a “hero landing”. This is where it started, and it’s just Tony punching the ground.
On the Comics side…
It began with Joe Quesada but it hasn’t ended with him. While Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad were looking to use movies to boost merchandise sales, their field of interest as a toy company, they really weren’t paying attention to what Quesada was doing. From working with Sana Amanat to turn Marvel Comics into a “lifestyle brand” to ending the Spider-Marriage in a way even more controversial than the ending itself, to moving away from superhero tales (things Axel Alonzo and Tom Brevoort haven’t changed), the comics almost seem like an afterthought. I expect that from Disney and the Hollywood system. The fact that the comics have allowed themselves to be slaves to the “important media” of movies and television/streaming is just sad.
Ending the Spider-Marriage has been their first big mistake. Quesada put his own interests, which happened to be shared with most if not all of the Spider-Writers, above what the fans wanted. To them, Peter being married, which happened back in the 1980s, aged the character and a divorce would cause what they saw as further damage. Based on most stuff out there I get the impression everyone wants him back in high school, even though he didn’t meet most of his supporting cast until college. That’s where the origin is, and he who controls the origin controls the character. Instead of using Miles Morales or Spider-Boy, it has to be Peter. They can’t get away with it in the comics. They can end a marriage with its fans, damage Mary Jane Watson as a character as much as possible, and bring in romances we know will never go anywhere because of how they treat the Spider-Marriage, teasing readers every now and then that they might get back together.
That wouldn’t be enough. It’s also how the marriage was undone that even haters of the marriage get mad among fans. Spider-Man making a deal with Marvel’s usual go-to devil stand-in…[“but he’s not the…”]
…Marvel’s usual go-to devil stand-in sits poorly with fans who also can’t believe he alone could heal the bullet wound of an old woman. (Wanna know something sad? I just got the last line’s reference and I’ve seen this clip on its own and in the episode many times.) More like Mephisto did something that only he could undo, but that’s never considered. They wanted the marriage retconned out of continuity completely and that’s what they came up with, ruining Peter as a hero while making MJ talk him into it as part of plan to ruin her as a character and love interest. Meanwhile, praise came from Renew Your Vows as a concept as well as actually seeing Peter and MJ married with children in Ultimate Spider-Man ver 2. There’s also some game of musical symbiotes going on, but I’ve stopped caring by now.
What’s happened outside of the spider’s web? The X-Men went to live on an island from an old horror comic, and argue with each other, occasionally doing something to die so they can come back as plant people, and have Hellfire galas. At least that’s what I get from Comics By Perch as I never really cared about X-Men when it was still good. Tony Stark managed to come back from the dead…again…to fend off his black teen girl with attitude replacement, become a politician, marry Emma Frost, have his parentage altered because they ran out of ideas, and not do all the cool stuff I used to like about Iron Man stories. I dropped that the moment he became Secretary Of Defense and it sounds like he got worse and worse since. The movie didn’t appear to save him. Meanwhile Rhodey, my first comics Iron Man keeps getting treated like garbage from the comics to the MCU, between being cybernized, being dead, or in the streaming world being a Skrull the whole time.
Meanwhile we have namesakes and replacements nobody cared about or liked better when they had their own identity instead of showing how becoming Captain America can be a downgrade (especially with writers who on social media show how much they hate America and a certain spray tan victim turned President more than writing an American icon), a cool idea of a superhero fangirl living her dream replaced with a slice of life story of a Muslim teen girl trying to fit in, black not-yet-teen girl with attitude stealing Devil Dinosaur from Moon Boy (and he’s probably dead) for wacky hijinks, teen heroes more teen than hero, and the only interesting stuff coming from the return of DC crossovers that just look desperate from both companies rather than a return to the fun adventures of the past. You could make a case that DC has gotten worse and it’s not like there aren’t any superhero stories coming from Marvel, but when they’re more interested in who they can make gay next rather than heroes fighting villains, we’re not going to care. So far the property fans are most excited for is Marvel Rivals because they’re actually using Marvel lore to make fans happy. Other Marvel games are also getting more praise than the comics in my circles. I’m a DC guy (or was until DiDio and his acolytes screwed everything up over there) but I used to be interested in Marvel’s comic universe. Not so much these days.
On the Studios side…
Before Disney, Marvel Studios was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing. Released through Paramount, the first Iron Man movie took a little known comic hero and made him a household name. He already was for me, but he’s my favorite Marvel superhero…which Marvel on both sides can’t stop messing up. That’s because the first two movies were good adaptations, which pleased the fans who by all the merch Perlmutter and Arad were looking to for serious revenue (“where the real money from the movie is made”). They were also a good stories on their own that didn’t lose the casual audience. Everybody got what they wanted and everything was cool. That trend continued for the first few phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. People who wanted to do the plot as fitting multiversal continuity were there and did their jobs right, and unlike the studios who licensed and screwed up those adaptations while Marvel was fighting bankruptcy under the owners prior to Toy Biz, Marvel was making superhero stories people loved. That was the goal of Marvel Studios and it worked. the A-listers weren’t available so they took the B team and made them successful.
Then for reasons I’m not privy to (though I can gue$$), Toy Biz sold Marvel to Disney, and like they’ve done with all their other acquisitions, they broke what worked. The group who maintained multiversal continuity were tossed out as Kevin Feige finally got to do what he wanted…whatever the hell he and his pals wanted while using existing brand names to trick the studios into making whatever garbage they wanted to. For some fans Endgame was the end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, saying good-bye to characters they grew to love rather than recasting them. Tony Stark? Dead. Black Panther? Dead and replaced by his sister despite how the lore worked. Captain America? Abandoned everyone to go back to his 1940s girlfriend.
That could still work. Marvel has plenty of characters they could use as the next generation of MCU heroes. Instead they chose the new heroes or newer stages of existing heroes that fans didn’t catch on with in the comics, and made them worse in the movies and streaming shows. Riri is here, a character nobody liked in the comics somehow made worse in live-action by upping her attitude and reducing her already questionable morality. Apparently the only way you can make her a good character is completely altering her personality. Stripping Sam Wilson of a hero identity he created because to some people you only matter if you have the top title and Captain America was it, altering Sam’s goals and making him a terrorist apologist who can’t get a boat loan because racism, didn’t do them every favors. Misusing the concept of the Thunderbolts for misunderstood villains nobody cared about and two better Captain America choices narratively being a team of misfits won no favors. Meanwhile, the only identity Carol Danvers has been unimpressive in since Captain Marvel as a Marvel hero title only exists to keep Billy Batson from getting his hero name back because “we’re Marvel Comics” is the one they go with in the MCU. Personally, I like her better as Warbird, but shout-out to the Binary fans. We see you, and we’re sorry how that name would look in 2026.
Streaming didn’t help the MCU, either. Loki joined The Mandalorian in undoing fan goodwill by weakening their main characters. Telling us Wanda taking over a town over losing her robo-boyfriend only to later trash the multiverse to get kids she never actually had somehow made the “Disassembled” arc from the comics look better (still not good) in comparison for her character assassination. She-Hulk‘s writers were more interested in trashing the fans than making a good story while from what I hear the Daredevil writers would rather write about mob politics and legal briefs than tell a superhero story about the protector of Hell’s Kitchen. This is where Rhodey became a Skrull and Riri made her “deal with the devil”. This is where showrunners decided they liked the names but hated the characters, changing Ms Marvel’s powers and Echo’s whole story to suit their preferences.
The end result is that in every area Marvel was succeeding in the MCU before Disney they failed miserably after Disney took over. Rhodey should have been the new Iron Man while Falcon showed off how cool he was in his own adventures. If you’re going to mess with John Walker, make the former Russian agent by brainwashing into the new Captain America as he was the former sidekick of the first one. Let John Walker become US Agent. Don’t ruin your female heroes. Use the fan favorite versions, fix mistakes made by the comics for new heroes because every character deserves a chance (maybe they can make Northstar memorable and really create a miracle). We didn’t even get into the Inhumans and Eternals. It’s a simple formula: make something the fans want that casual readers and viewers can also get into, and you’ve got the money in your pocket. Trash the fans and bore the casuals and you get…the Marvel brand in 2026, the poster child of “superhero fatigue” for people who already hated superhero stories to use to enforce they’re snobby elitist views and kill superhero stories in favor of their boring intellectual and stereotype-ridden false “representation” on everyone.
You have a blueprint to how to do it right. It’s everything you tossed out.
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