Old Hollywood, New Hollywood: How Quantity Over Quality Came to Dominate Marvel

Or How 1930s Tycoons Paved the Way for Kevin Feige’s World Domination

Edgar Wright reunites with Paul Rudd- a few years after Wright departed from Ant-Man over “creative differences” with Marvel

This is a continuation of the series "The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of the MCU". To check out the intro post for the series, click here.

In 2004, Bob Dylan spoke on 60 Minutes of how he conjured up the lyrics to “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”…

Bob: ”I don’t know how I got to write those songs… Those early songs were, like, almost magically written.”

[He proceeds to recite some of the lyrics: ”Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon. A handmade blade, a child’s balloon eclipses…”]

Bob: [continued] ”Well, try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that and it’s not Siegfried & Roy kind of magic, you know? It’s a different kind of a penetrating magic.”

Dylan wasn’t the only artist who bore these sentiments about art being much deeper than an idea formed by mere humans. Painters like Paul Klee believed art was an exploration of the metaphysical, while Michelangelo took refuge in a sculpture already existing within a marble block — it was only his job to chisel away and reach it. Art is a reflection of the divine, and expresses emotions in inexplicable ways. A true artist just knew that there was more to his work than meets the eye. The divine has to be behind the creation, influencing the artist to be moved and to move others through his individuality and honesty in expression. That divine push is that kind of a penetrating magic.

As reverie in entertainment continues via watching movies on our phones, laptops and tablets instead of going to one’s local theater, it might (or does for people like me) seem like a devolution. A devolution of this art — the medium of film. As visual creativity has devolved from the likes of Bernini’s sculptures in the Vatican or Frederic Remington’s oil paintings of the American West, and into risible performance “art” — ranging from wall scribbling to dropping ping pong balls on a staircase in New York City’s art exhibits, it cannot be helped but for my own tired eyes to see, somewhat, this same path towards thoughtful expression’s diminishment in the realm of motion pictures.

We can try and pinpoint where the quality decrease in movies began in the 21st century. For example, Netflix and Apple TV have taken the cake in producing truckloads of new entertainment, which supersedes the public’s desire to see a movie in theaters. Generally, any film nominated now in these annoyingly pontificating elitist award shows is a project no one has heard of, and honestly doesn’t hold interest to watch (for me, at least).

What is popular now? What would us plebeians hit up several movie theaters to see?

Besides the yearly horror film, eccentric dark comedy, or appetizing nostalgia through Tom Cruise sprinting, leaping, and soaring through the air (that’s worth the price of admission now over much else), it’s the popular screen portrayals of comic book characters. As figures of what ideally should be a new American mythology, superheroes on film are now on a downward spiral of quality — and speaking of nostalgia, that now seems to be the only ingredient left to keep these Marvel movies standing on two legs (the return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Hugh Jackman’s comeback as the iconic Logan in Deadpool and Wolverine, for example).

This downward spiral arguably began circa the 2010s in Kevin Feige’s long standing Marvel Cinematic Universe.