The X-Men and Women Who Might Be the Reason for Marvel’s Box Office Decline

Listening to the great Ankler podcast a few weeks ago as the hosts theorized as to why Thunderbolts* and other recent MCU films such as Captain America: Brave New World had been met with such lackluster box office results.  

The panel was composed of millennial-aged journalists who suggested one possible explanation was that the Millennials who had been so committed to attending every entry in the MCU canon when they were younger, had now grown up, had kids, and just didn’t have the time anymore to make movie-going a priority.

I can accept this as one possible theory but the limited age range of the folks pondering the question in turn limited the depth of the probable answers. 

From my Gen-X perspective, I think something also has to do with those of us who were parents of kids who were between ages 8 and 16 in the 2010s and took their Gen-Z kids to these movies during prime Phase 2 and 3 MCU. I’m talking Winter Soldier, Guardians 1 & 2, Ant-Man, Ragnorak, Black Panther, and Civil War. Now those kids have grown up and either associate those movies with their parents and ergot aren’t cool, or feel like the saga ended with EndGame and felt no need to continue.

Additionally, while we’ve seen artifacts from Gen-Z childhood like Minecraft and Minions become hits and viral phenomena, those have a heavy dose of nostalgia driving their popularity. This is a critical element that I’ve never heard anyone mention. Gen-Z isn’t nostalgic for MCU because the MCU has never gone away. It’s always been there and after EndGame, instead of giving the culture a moment to rest and breathe, they doubled-down with the Disney+ Marvel shows and new characters like The Eternals and Shang Chi. There’s never been a pause and as a result Gen-Z has had no time to miss it and become nostalgic for comic book movies. 

I’ve never been a comic book reader, but I love superhero stories. The seventies SuperFriends cartoon, the ‘66 Batman series that was in syndication, and the Christopher Reeve Superman films were absolute cornerstones of my childhood. So when the wave of superhero cinema started in earnest with X-Men and Raimi’s Spider-Man, I was ready. My comics-loving friends even moreso.  After the diminishing cinematic returns in the eighties of the Superman franchise and in lesser mid-nineties entries of the Batman franchise, Gen-X kids had waited a long time to see all these Marvel characters finally get big screen films with big-time budgets. Big-time budgets relatively speaking, but certainly huge compared to the threadbare Marvel entries of The Punisher (1989) with Dolph Lundgren and the Matt Salinger Captain America (1990). 

And imagine how fulfilled and relieved we were when the films themselves turned out to actually be good, or with entries like X2 and Spider-man 2, even great. In general, genre entertainment was on the rise in the nineties. On TV we had Lois and Clark, The X-Files, and three different Star Trek shows. Meanwhile, inspired by the success of Batman, pulp heroes like The Shadow, The Phantom and even Dick Tracy got big screen adaptations.  

Gen-X had been primed throughout the nineties with seeds of comic book culture seemingly appearing everywhere. Kevin Smith includes Mysterio references in Clerks, has Stan Lee cameo in Mallrats, and makes the leads of Chasing Amy comics artists. In the Tarantino-penned Tony Scott-directed True Romance our protagonist played by Gen-X icon Christian Slater works in a comic book store. And let’s not forget when Tarantino script-doctored a two page conversation about the Silver Surfer into the middle of Tony Scott’s submarine thriller Crimson Tide. 

We were the generation who turned up for Blade, embraced an unknown Hugh Jackman, and had a long history with Rober Downey Jr so we never questioned his casting as Ironman. We’d been waiting for the dam to finally break and have the rest of culture catch up to us and our niche nerd interests. 

All this to say that Millennials don’t get to claim success or failure for the MCU. Gen-X is responsible for its rise and unfortunately I believe we’re also responsible for its fall.