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The early marketing for The Marvels provided a fairly accurate idea of the film’s presentation. MCU marketing has a straightforward strategy. The comedic entries get silly trailers, and the serious ones get slow piano music. Marvel followed the format for The Marvels‘s first trailer, the one we all saw at movie theaters for months. However, its recent trailers tie the film to The Avengers and Infinity War. Why invent connections that don’t exist when everyone’s sick of franchise-building?
“Be There for the Moment That Changes Everything”
The Marvels‘ marketing screams a terrible message to its audience. We’ve all read the reports suggesting it’ll be Marvel’s first flop. Many fans hated Captain Marvel or Ms. Marvel and showed no interest in a sequel. Superhero fatigue is at an all-time high. Every project has to push against the label. Loki is a bona fide hit, partially because of its distance from the MCU formula. Marvel pitched The Marvels as goofy, action-packed sci-fi superhero stuff in its first ads. That approach failed, so it introduced callbacks, like in the Final Trailer above. Anyone familiar with the MCU would understand the grim cowardice that motivated the change. That lack of faith only strengthens its potential for failure. The marketing for MCU projects shouldn’t be more referential than the film.
The Marvels was the worst film to attach callbacks to. It moves past every backstory detail at breakneck speed. Monica Rambeau explains the WandaVision incident that gave her superpowers in about eight seconds. Kamala mentions her Grandmother’s bangle twice. Carol’s flashbacks seem like they’re being played in fast-forward. The Marvels is a sequel to two Marvel projects, but its connection to the multiverse is almost incidental. I prefer superhero movies that stick to their story rather than lazily building the franchise. The Marvels abandoned the celebration it deserved for telling its story until the last few minutes. Marvel needed to remind you of the fun times you had a decade ago in the desperate hope it would bring you to The Marvels. That’s a frightening instinct, and we haven’t seen the last of it.
Marvel Can’t Give Up on New Stories
Marvel lost faith in The Marvels, so it altered its marketing with shots from other movies. That decision would make sense if the film connected to its chosen clips, but it’s reaching for whatever works. This two-minute trailer is a microcosm of Marvel’s post-Endgame slump strategy. The studio can’t acknowledge its audience’s superhero fatigue because it has a decade of pre-planned projects in the genre. The production team can’t address the generic presentation of their films because the focus groups have approved them. All it can do is reach back to the golden days. This is our fault, too. We all applauded when Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield came back for No Way Home. If the studio can’t sell new characters, it’ll keep dredging up old ones until it stops selling.
Watching the MCU marketing machine fold in on itself is heartbreaking. I love many MCU films, but I don’t want them chopped up and sold back to me a decade after we all enjoyed them. Now Marvel executives are openly discussing paying Robert Downey Jr. to return. It’s shameful. The Marvels had selling points worth putting in a trailer. It could play up the comedic elements. The film could show off the Dragon Ball Z scale of the action scenes. It could even lean into weird, goofy science fiction ideas and promote the film as a trippy “Hitchhiker’s Guide with superheroes” project. The only wrong answer was packing in clips from The Avengers to sell something unrelated.
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Who Is Dar-Benn in The Marvels?The DCEU has been, by and large, less successful than the MCU. Marvel is still the high watermark for the cinematic universe model, even as it slowly overgrows and dies. Falling back on tricks it’s done before will only hasten the franchise’s fall from grace. James Gunn’s DCEU understands this, so it has reinvented its entire slate. Marvel needs to take similarly drastic actions to stay afloat because memories will fail them. Don’t see The Marvels because you loved The Avengers. See it because it’s goofy fun or because you love Kamala Khan.
