Movie franchises put profits over quality storytelling

Alexa Amick Staff Reporter

Throughout current years, fans of various different franchises have taken notice to a substantial shift in the quality of content released from their favorite franchises. Going from, seemingly, taking over 5 years to make releasable content, content nowadays feels as if it’s being mass-produced in efforts to either make more money than the companies did before or to make more money in smaller amounts of time.

Enthusiasts have peculiarly observed this through box offices for newly released films, exceptionally so with the Marvel franchise. Sequel movies, as of late, haven’t been performing as well as their predecessors, whether or not that difference is large or minimal. Take Thor for example. The first two Thor movies released, Thor and Thor: The Dark World, are largely ignored by audiences as their stories seem repetitive and redundant, much like the Hulk movies. Instead, audiences focus their attention on the two newest Thors, Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder. Comparably, Thor: Ragnarok is one of the few movies of the franchise held in a positive regard by many fans, as seen in the 87% audience score and 93% Tomatometer score received on Rotten Tomatoes. Whereas, Thor: Love and Thunder, one of the more anticipated movies of phase four of the MCU, Marvel Cinematic Universe, received only a 77% audience score and 64% Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, falling short for many fans who had been excited for it.

However, a large portion of this change cannot be focused on the box office and movies alone. As of the recent years, more content has shifted away from movies to focus on smaller shows. And, although the reviews of them vary with mixed opinions, they can and have played an equally important role in the timeline of the MCU. Although, much like it can be argued with the movies, the shows have also represented the shift from quality content to quantity.

“I lost more interest in the MCU as they began to release a bunch of shows all at once,” says senior Chloe Anderson, “especially because they shows seemingly wanted to increase engagement in a shorter amount of time.”

A rather large example of this is shown through one of the more popular shows, Loki. Loki revolves around the character, as the name obviously suggests, Loki and his adventures through a variety of universes. In particular, many fans were extremely excited for the show to release as Loki had always been a fanfavorite character, even though he was “killed off” on a regular basis. However, as quickly as the show was released, many fans rapidly became disappointed by it. The show was subjected to the basic cliches that bring many shows down: a character falling in love with someone who obviously isn’t good for them (and figuring whether they will or won’t end up together), a character suddenly becoming good before once again becoming evil (i.e. anti-villain trope), and, ultimately, poor communication leading to the main conflict of the show, until the characters are forced to express their feelings. These cliches, and other elements of the show, lead fans to be disappointed in the film, feeling as if the characters personalities were disregarded to push a narrative that doesn’t work well with them. And, unfortunately so, this decharacterization is largely seen with many characters in the new era of Marvel: characters shifting from being interestingly throughout with well written stories to being flat characters that could be interpreted as background characters given the chance, as seen with Thor: Love and Thunder as well. Overall, this lines up with the shift from producing quality content to producing content that releases in a short amount of time. Writers and producers, along with other elements that make up their storytelling, spend less time developing characters in a manner that makes sense to instead focus on producing more bland stories in a short amount of time with minimal effort.

However, this switch does not apply to every movie or show released after a certain point. Much of the content released is still loved by fans because decent writing is actually put into it, such as Moon Knight. But, the simple fact of the matter though is that, even with quality content being released every so often, more of that content is still quantity-oriented, especially seen with producers releasing content no one particularly wanted or requested specifically.

It leaves the questions, “Will they ever revert back to more quality-based content?” And, unfortunately, as of late, it seems likely they will not. “[Personally,] I don’t think they’ll ever really focus on quality content over quantity content again because they’re more concerned with making profit nowadays,” Anderson expressed, “but there’s always a small possibility.”