Marvel Fatigue, Media Parlor Games, and the Kotick Question

Happy Friday, dear reader, and welcome back to The Daily Courant, highlighting the latest and most noteworthy Puck journalism of the day.
 
First up, Matt Belloni looks under the hood of the Marvel juggernaut at Disney, where C.E.O. Bob Chapek has commanded his creatives to churn out more and more superhero content. In doing so, however, Marvel has gone from a special-occasion franchise to an omnipresent cultural-economic force that is essentially always on. Not even the NFL does that. At some point, is there a cost to that strategy?

Then, below the fold: Dylan Byers addresses the chatter inside the media firmament over Comcast eyeing Activision, a potential executive shakeup at Disney, and what’s next for Brian Williams after retiring his lanyard at 30 Rock.

Marvel’s Miracle Man at a Crossroads

Diminishing returns seems like an inescapable endgame, especially if quality control becomes an issue and lower box office means fewer megahits to mine for spin-offs. Has Marvel passed its peak?

It’s hard not to see Spider-Man: No Way Home as one of the biggest flexes in the history of the movie business. Think about what happened here. A major studio, Sony Pictures, had so badly managed its most valuable piece of I.P. that in 2015, chairman Tom Rothman agreed to do the unthinkable: Share the character, let another studio produce its Spider-Man movies, and allow Spidey to appear in that studio’s own movies for free. And not just any studio, it was Disney’s Marvel unit, which had embarrassed Sony and the rest of Hollywood with an unprecedented run of hyper-profitable and flywheel-friendly blockbusters based on “lesser” comic book characters like Thor and Ant-Man. The indignity.

Then, once the first two movies, Homecoming (2017) and Far from Home (2019), reinvigorated the franchise, Disney tightened the vice on Rothman’s nuts, eventually forcing Sony to give up 25 percent of the profits to keep Marvel involved on a third movie, No Way Home (Dec. 17). That film, which incorporates Disney’s characters, like Doctor Strange, and opens the door to the “multiverse” with past Spideys, could become the first billion-dollar grosser of the pandemic era. Nothing has opened to $100 million domestic since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker in Dec. 2019, and No Way Home is tracking to hit $150 million (though Sony is lowballing in the media). According to multiple sources, there’s a deal for a fourth Marvel-produced movie that will star Tom Holland, and it’s already quietly in development.   

That’s what Kevin Feige has accomplished here, just in case anyone has doubts about who is the most important employee at the Walt Disney Company. The Marvel Studios president has now presided over the Marvel Miracle for 13 years now—24 of his own movies and three of Sony’s, and not an outright flop among them. Since wresting control of the unit from Ike Perlmutter in 2015, Feige has established his own culture and ramped up output, which can be three to four films a year, plus multiple Disney+ series. Despite that, Marvel’s product has remained impervious to the usual franchise fatigue that has plagued every other property in the blockbuster era. It’s really unbelievable. Yet… it can’t go on forever, can it? The Marvel Miracle must end, or at least slow down, right?  

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT