they are characters that had their own titles for nearly 50 years, had been in cartoons and on t-shirts and lunchboxes and toys and so were not total unknowns.
Right, but the success of the MCU was not built on the comic audience. There simply aren't enough of those people. It was new, and interesting, and it was doing things with crossover media that had never been done using skilled, known but not oversaturated actors in roles they'd not been in before. The direction and writing were ok, and each film was, until the second Avengers, largely standalone. The road map for how to build a larger audience was straightforward. Build a lot of little audiences for characters, and then Voltron them together. The MCU audience is an order of magnitude larger than the comic reading audience ever has been. The vast majority of folks who are into it now not only never read a Thor comic before, but STILL haven't.
We have to be fair, though; are people still willing to accept that level of quality? Thor has to be taken in its proper context as the MCU still figuring itself out. They didn't even know what the PLAN was yet beyond 'we gotta get the Avengers together.' This is when they still thought the Avengers movie might close out the entire MCU project.
I'll be honest, I think the movies since Endgame using known heroes would KILL to be as good as the original Thor. Wakanda Forever gets a bit of a pass for obvious reasons, but it's still not great and is why we'll probably not get a Namor movie. Multiverse of Madness is just awful front to back (and I was HYPED for Raimi to take that one). Black Widow is superhero espionage done about half as well as Winter Soldier and feels very "well, I guess we SHOULD to give her one...". Thor: Love and Thunder and Quantamania are... films I saw. One is just a director phoning it in for a check while he and the actors fuck around, and the other is like homework "watch this first so we can give you the REAL plot later". And then of course they dropped Kang entirely so we did that homework for nothing. The last Spider-man film and Guardians seem to be crowd pleasers even if I find them both pretty hollow for different reasons. I haven't seen Brave New World and nobody who has makes me want to.
Like, the quality of the new stuff just isn't that much higher than it used to be, and in many ways I think it's worse. The effects certainly aren't getting any better (Strange's third eye and MODOK are just unforgivable). And I can feel the focus-testing rewrites in every piece now.
But we've moved on from that and done really crazy stuff since then, and there's a publicized plan in place for like the next fifty-six years of MCU content. So NOW if something comes out and it's on par with the quality of 'Thor,' - I'm not sure that's a glowing endorsement of why anyone would even want to watch it.
I suppose I'm arguing that we have a problem with escalation, and fans, really at no fault of Disney, may be struggling to be interested in things that don't seem to know where they want to exist in the franchise yet; a problem that got a pass back then that probably doesn't get a pass now.
These are related, I think the "plan" is a HUGE part of the problem. The idea is to keep the hype train rolling, but what it's actually done is replicate in movies one of the worst parts of shared universe comic book reading. The individual books/movies are now viewed by the company as only as good as their service to this huge over-narrative. It used to be that the individual stuff had to carry it's own weight, and the team-ups were a special treat. But the weight has shifted, because of fans and the companies, to the inverse. I think it's a critical flaw in the writing of these things since about Civil War, and it's only gotten worse.
I think not allowing any of the new stuff to build it's own identity is a big chunk of why they can't audience build like they used to.
The main problem is that brilliant guy in an armored suit that can fly and shoot things, super strong noble athlete who fought the Nazis, super powerful Norse God who has a huge hammer and controls lightening, super strong teenager who can shoot webs at people, and brilliant guy who turns into an huge green mindless creature are all more interesting characters than normal guy who gets real big and small, normal guy who is good at kung fu, alien robots waiting for a space god, etc.
Yeah, I just don't agree here. Guardians of the Galaxy is super off the mainstream branch and people showed up for every one of those films. It's arguably the most well liked sub-trilogy other than Cap, and one of this three is just Avengers 2.5.
"Normal guy who is good at kung-fu" is the basis for
decades of successful movies. And if you add in even a slight amount of super-powered goofiness you get stuff like the Matrix. It isn't impossible to make Shang Chi awesome, but it does take time and effort. Shang was a good start, and if we'd cared about making him take off he'd have a sequel by now that took all the kung-fu action from the first and made it better by using the best fight choreographers money could buy along with the time to craft a new core fight scene for each act of the film (Shang Chi had 2, and it's worst sin was not having a 3rd).
The Eternals were a weird one and were always going to be weird. It's fine. They were a gamble and it didn't pay off. That's going to happen. Every phase is going to have a Hulk in it. FWIW I really liked how daring that one was, even if it didn't stick the landing (kinda like Hulk, actually).
Again I can't speak to FF and Thunderbolts but so far as I can tell, both were reasonably successful and well liked. And if they had been a higher priority we'd be getting second installments of them by now instead of cramming them into a film that is already going to be stuffed to the gills.
