Marvel Movies have been the prime source of Superhero media for years, but recently people seem to be losing interest in Marvel. According to Business Insider, each Avengers movie made $858.4 million, $678.8 million, and $623.4 million in the domestic box office, where as more recent movies like Thunderbolts* made $190.3 million in the domestic box office according to Forbes, completely underperforming the Avengers franchise . Many people believe that there just isn’t as much demand for superhero movies, but the new DCU is doing great! The same year as Thunderbolts* the new DCU premiered with Superman (2025) making $354.2 million in gross domestic income according to The Numbers, similar to the MCU’s premiere release Iron Man 1 with $318.6 million. So, what’s different about the current MCU? There are three main issues that have been present in Marvel for a while: Disney’s ownership over Marvel, limited changes in tone and genre, and overwhelming amounts of content that has to be watched in order to understand the plot.
Disney is a titan in the entertainment industry, owning around 27% of entertainment companies. Including Hulu, Marvel, ESPN, and of course Disney+. A large problem with this is the fact that some Marvel superheroes are actually owned by Sony. Spiderman and many of his characters are in an exclusive deal to Sony, meaning that in order to make the MCU’s Spiderman movies they are basically renting out the character. This causes him to be suspiciously absent outside of the films, creating confusion in a lot of the New York centered shows. They are also heavily in control of content. Causing these overly “Disney” tones where the outcomes are almost always predictable, as well as some clunky dialogue that has become an MCU staple.
They are slowly moving away from these kinds of tones and genres, especially looking at their shows like Moonknight, Daredevil Born Again (Season 2), and the upcoming Punisher Special Presentation. With all of these shows, there comes some mediocre movies, and more bad ones. All of this content can get overwhelming when you need it to understand a movie, even more so when you need that movie and five others with just as much homework to understand the next. This leads to people eventually, losing interest in Marvel movies as a whole.
These are issues that DC doesn’t have in its current state. Sure, you can watch Creature Commandos, Peacemaker, and Clayface before you watch the inevitable Justice League movie, but you don’t have to. All of these projects exist for their own sake, you could understand them without even watching any other DC project. This is very similar to why the Netflix Marvel TV shows did so well. Punisher, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist weren’t tied to the mainline Marvel plotlines, they were only loosely tied to each other via The Defenders.
The difference between James Gunn’s DCU and the MCU is that one rewards the audience for watching the stand alone projects (References to them are throughout Superman), whereas the other makes it necessary. Forcing your audience to watch all of the unsuccessful projects makes them lose interest in the genuinely good ones.
