Two of Marvel‘s most iconic filmmakers, Joe and Anthony Russo, aka the Russo Brothers have spoken out about the current superhero fatigue issue that they are facing. The brothers were the minds behind films from Captain America: Civil War to Avengers: Endgame, arguably Marvel’s most successful era in recent years.
The MCU suffered in 2024 with flops from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels leading to a decline in interest from audiences globally. Speaking on the studio’s recent struggles to GameRadar+, the directors explained their perspective about just why they think people are not gravitating towards the same storylines anymore.
Joe Russo explains, “I think it’s a reflection of the current state of everything. It’s difficult right now, it’s an interesting time. I think we’re in a transitional period and people don’t know quite yet how they’re going to receive stories moving forward, or what kinds of stories they’re going to want.” He added, “There’s a big generational divide about how you consume media. There’s a generaiton that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s aging out. Meanwhile the new generation are ‘I want it now, I want to process it now,’ then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time. You know, it’s a very different moment in time than it’s ever been. And so I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what’s at play more than anything else.”
With the new generation, there seems to be a shorter attention span, which Russo attests to “memes and headlines with nobody reading past two sentences, so everything’s 100 characters or less – or 10-second videos on social media you swipe through. I think that the two-hour format, the structure that goes into making a movie, it’s over a century old now and everything always transitions.” Anthony Russo chimes in about the “superhero fatigue question” at large, “…we always used to cite this back in our early days with superhero work. People used to complain about westerns in the same way but they lasted for decades and decades and decades. They were continually reinvented and brought to new heights as they went on.”
