In 2015, the Golden State Warriors won their first championship in 40 years. The following season, they broke the single-season record for wins, dethroning the legendary Michael Jordan’s 1996 Chicago Bulls. Although they failed to win the championship for a second consecutive year, they brought in Kevin Durant, one of the game’s best players, for the 2016-2017 campaign and subsequently won back-to-back titles.

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2019 saw a fifth straight trip to the Finals, where a talented Toronto Raptors team took advantage of a deep roster to best a thinner and hampered Golden State. The next two years saw the Warriors struggle with injuries as they sought to keep their dynasty afloat. As of last night, the Golden State Warriors have a 1-0 lead in their best-of-seven series against the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA’s Western Conference Finals, three wins away from a sixth appearance in the championship round with the same core that won them the title seven years ago: 2x-MVP Stephen Curry, former Defensive Player of the Year Draymond Green, and arguably the game’s all-time second-best shooter, Klay Thompson.

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The roster has undergone significant changes over the seven years since their championship night in Cleveland. David Lee, Andrew Bogut, Harrison Barnes, and Leandro Barbosa all departed after the 2016 Finals collapse. David West, brought in for the 2017 and 2018 title seasons, retired after the second championship. Shaun Livingston hung ‘em up after 2019, and Durant left after that season. The new squad features promising rookies Jonathan Kuminga and Moses Moody, third-year breakout star Jordan Poole, veteran Kevon Looney taking on a more prominent role than ever, and Gary Payton II living up to his father’s legacy with elite defensive play. 

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The core has remained, the surrounding talent has changed, as has the coaching staff. Although they may not win a title, it is clear that remaining competitive while building for the future is possible; no franchise need “run on the treadmill of mediocrity.” 

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As it turns out, that same principle applies to movies.

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The MCU thrives financially because it caters to the same principle that has allowed a bevy of reality competition shows to live long past their seeming best-by date. American Idol and Survivor are far from the cultural and ratings juggernauts they were in the early aughts, but they’ve retained a loyal fanbase and dominated their time slots because they understood not only the need to evolve, but the correct way to do so. Mass experiences lose steam as we seek new content or witness our labor yield little fruit. As of 2022, only two Idol winners have ever made a significant, long-lasting commercial impression: Kelly Clarkson, the inaugural champion, and Carrie Underwood, who won nearly two decades ago. The way forward is not by relying on the same formula. After all, the adage has always been that insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results.

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Eventually, all products get whittled down to a core fanbase of devoted viewers, the people who want to feel they share in an experience that only they understand, and the show must understand the symbiosis between that inevitability and their role in creating it. The dialogue on the show will change from generalities about talent, video segments detailing what a particular contestant must do to progress to the next round, or confessionals detailing the hardship of backstabbing fellow castaways and into things specific to the audience. Musicians can bring their guitars and sing their own songs; various advantages of increasing complexity populate an already layered game; fans will submit their own video commentary about the quality of an aspiring model’s photo despite having zero professional experience in or insight into the fashion industry. You must know it to truly know it.

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The Multiverse of Madness continues satisfying that need for exclusivity, even as it balances it with retaining commercial appeal, although not nearly as much as the pre-Phase Four films. Even with the pandemic affecting box office returns, the cultural impact of installments like Shang-Chi and Eternals was minimal, regardless of the impact of not being able to gather for them in theaters the same as we did before. After all, Spiderman: No Way Home, released just three months after Shang-Chi and two after Eternals, currently sits as the 6th-highest-grossing film ever worldwide, with $1.892 billion in returns; to match that total, Shang-Chi and Eternals would have to double their combined global grosses, make an additional $1 billion dollars, and then another $60 million globally.

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The Warriors still draw higher local and national ratings than any other basketball team because they have a devoted fan base, the excitement of future talent, and mass appeal through Curry’s superstar prowess; the MCU remains the biggest financial force in Hollywood, thanks to its most-established and famous heroes and that respect for its inter-universe dynamics. It seems that the missing element is the promising new talent.

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Despite its socio-political relevance, Shang-Chi saw Marvel shrouded in controversy; some derided the film for failing to seize its representative opportunity or advertising itself as a win for representation despite that very idea propagating the very American sentiment that "Asian" is an all-encompassing cultural concept. Eternals is the only MCU installment to receive a “rotten” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, only doubling its budget in box office returns. Between the performance of its films last year, the message was clear: continuing after concluding an 11-year saga raises questions of need, challenging viewers to accept heroes and stories that aren’t yet building to something greater. It’s difficult to wrap up with the world’s second-highest-grossing film and not feel like continuing is an artistically pyrrhic victory. 

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The movies still turn a profit and mostly earn critical acclaim, even if the new heroes fail to earn the same place in the cultural zeitgeist as their predecessors. The Multiverse of Madness takes a break from the new MCU guard and focuses solely on the The question is, although Multiverse of Madness weaves the MCU’s canon into its narrative, forcing viewers to consume all of their content to fully understand the ins and outs of the franchise’s thematics, is it a genuinely good movie, or just a masterclass in money-making and franchise-furthering?

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The film is not without its issues, many fundamental to executing this very principle. Wanda Maximoff was given her own show, an opportunity to rake in the money for Marvel, but also to expand upon her character and afford her a chance to lay the foundation for more exploratory development in the primary MCU. In 2018’s Endgame, she killed Vision as a sacrifice to defeat Thanos, destroying the Mind Stone to prevent it from falling into his clutches. The maneuver failed; Thanos already had the Time Stone, given to him by Dr. Strange, allowing him to turn back the clock and disarm Wanda before killing Vision and seizing the stone for himself.

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The trauma of killing your true love at all, but especially in vain, goes unexplored in Wandavision. The rage she feels towards Dr. Strange, who gave the Time Stone to Thanos, is only lightly touched on in their initial conversation. Instead of devoting itself to establishing the pain she feels towards a friend who’s choices brought her unimaginable suffering, it settles for a quick line on its existence. Instead of allowing Maximoff to see Wandavision’s conclusion, that of a woman moving past her trauma and making the best of resolving the horror she inflicted on a small town, the MCU forces her to undo all of it to make her the villain. 

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It’s a curious choice considering Wandavision was redemptive for the MCU’s inability to pen Wanda (or Vision) as complete, full-bodied characters, a means of showing two people whose treatment indicated an inability to anchor individualized storylines could, in fact, anchor an individualized storyline. Her struggles tie-in with the trauma she endured at the end of Infinity War; in a moment, the very life she and Vision planned for themselves It also condemns the MCU to one of its most common criticisms: that its male characters are its bread and butter, the women an ill-conceived side dish. Everything Wandavision afforded its titular heroine gets stripped away in what feels very much like a first draft of a screenplay worth something independent of the universe it inhabits.

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It doesn’t help that despite Raimi’s knack for genre-blending, the backbone of Wanda’s manic characterization, the film cannot make the most of her abilities. All of her action sequences are clunky and disjointed, further evidence that Marvel thrives only in the musculature of heroes equipped with heavy machinery or brute strength. The finesse of a Scarlet Witch, or even a Doctor Strange, is not in their collective wheelhouse. Although a crucial component of the backend of the Infinity saga, Maximoff is very much a new character to the MCU in the sense that she’s finally gotten a moment in the sun. Sadly, her moment shows a lack of awareness of not only who, but how, Marvel must navigate very murky waters.

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After all, Anthony Russo, one of the chief architects of the MCU, admitted as much in a 2021 interview with ComicBook:

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“The unique thing about Endgame… is we did not have to think about what happened after Endgame… that was a mutually agreed upon thing that we came to with Marvel, because that was what freed us up… to think about closure, think about an end rather than think about where it goes next. And I think that was really a creative gift to us. And we used that.”
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It may have been a gift for them, but it is a curse for the MCU, which lacks the material from which to draw. The most commonly known, and thus bankable, heroes departed after the events of Endgame. All that’s left to do now is source the best talent possible, though it will never live up to the heft of heroes past. Jordan Poole will never be Steph Curry, but he can mimic him from time to time. Jonathan Kuminga will never be Draymond Green, though, with the proper tutelage, he can pick up a few of Green’s skills and show flashes of savant-like defensive prowess. People know the best they can get offered is lesser copies, but the MCU must realize that doesn’t mean those copies can’t bring their special something to the table. Shang-Chi needs more bite; the Eternals have to be literally anything. Each new hero has to get written with a deeper appreciation of the canon, not just a faint recollection of the blip and the trauma it unleashed on the world. Everything must feel tied together in a wholly exclusive way, accepting that, outside the most historically bankable protagonists, the money isn’t going to be there like it used to be. The early aughts TV smash hits remain strong today; the ratings aren’t the same, but by understanding the fate of any popular entertainment entity, they’ve thrived in circumstances the MCU has yet to figure out.

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The current course does not seem to have a destination, no great vision or master plan. The new characters it wants us to invest in, from Shang-Chi’s titular hero to Hawkeye’s Kate Bishop to Wanda in her more expansive role, are not people it understands how to portray, visually or thematically. It relies on pedigree and CGI to make its stories worthy of the massive box office returns and consistently high critical marks. It’s true that every institution needs pedigree to succeed; name alone can carry just about anything a long, long way.

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Unfortunately, stature cannot breathe life into a dying star forever. The MCU may be far away from extinction, but nothing lasts forever; the job of any entity is to extend its lifespan for as long as possible. The Multiverse of Madness shows us that visual creativity won’t expire any time soon, but looking towards the future, it remains clear that the right talent has not been curated, from the heroes it chooses to feature to the way it elects to feature them to the understanding of how to surge ahead when tradition says it is not possible. 

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The MCU has no Jordan Poole or Jonathan Kuminga, no one to inspire interest outside the core heroes. It is difficult to watch the old guard age and accept that you must start the countdown to their departure. It is more difficult to not have a good team at all. The Multiverse of Madness hotshots the franchise by dipping its wick back into its pre-Phase Four collection, and smartly forces its narrative to rely on canon. In doing so, it exposes Marvel’s realization that they will never reach the heights they once did. No 52-million viewer finales or consistent run of being the #1 show on TV; no back-to-back titles or 73-win seasons. Marvel can now be only a 53-win team, trying to master a balancing act that will allow them to return to greatness, albeit in a different way and with less flash and dominance as they once experienced. Still, the results are all that matters. A Warriors championship this year is the same as any of the preceding three. Survivor or Idol consistently winning their time slots will still please executives and advertisers. It may not be what it was, but it can still be something great; it’s up to Marvel to figure out the why and the how.

Director - Sam Raimi

Studio - Walt Disney Studios

Runtime - 126 minutes

Release Date - May 6, 2022

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Cast:

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Benedict Cumberbatch - Dr. Stephen Strange

Elizabeth Olson - Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch

Benedict Wong - Wong‍

Chiwetel Ejiofor - Karl Mordo

Rachel McAdams - Christine Palmer

Xochitl Gomez - America Chavez

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Editor - Bob Murawski, Tia Nolan

Cinematography - John Mathieson

Screenplay - Michael Waldron

Score - Danny Elfman