‘Avengers’ Directors Don’t Believe That Superhero Fatigue Exists: “The New Generation Are ‘I Want It Now, I Want to Process It Now’”
If you go by your average MCU fandom opinion, ‘Avengers: Endgame’ was the last truly good movie in the cinematic universe before things went downhill. After the movie was released the studio found itself faced with first critical and commercial flops, and plenty of people were ready to point the finger at superhero fatigue.
This theory does have legs to stand on, the market was at that point saturated with superhero movies both when it comes to MCU and DCEU, but their quality wasn’t getting better.
In the last year, both MCU and DCEU had massive flops and most of their movies barely managed to break even. ‘The Marvels’ turned out to be a historic flop, the lowest-grossing MCU movie to date, and the first not to break the $100 million market domestically.
Speaking with GamesRadar, The Russo brothers, who delivered some of the best masterpieces of superhero cinema commented on the superhero fatigue, and they don’t think that it really exists. They believe that it’s all about how younger generations consume media.
There’s a big generational divide about how you consume media. here’s a generation 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.
No matter how old (or young) you are you’ve probably noticed that today’s media mostly revolve around shock value and being “in the now.” The attention span is getting shorter while our ability to truly understand and process information longer than several words, lessens.
If you’re among the people just absorbing headlines without ever truly reading what the piece is about, you’re probably doing it to stay productive and “consume” information on the go, but you’re doing irreparable damage to your ability to truly understand what you’re reading.
But this is likely a story for a different piece, for now, we’re discussing superhero movies. No matter whether you liked it or not, the Russo brothers are correct and cinema will have to evolve, just like plenty of other forms of media.
Joe Russo commented on the communication habits of the new generation of moviegoers, highlighting their preference for brief, easily digestible content such as memes, headlines, and short videos on social media. He noted that attention spans are short, with most people not reading beyond two sentences or engaging with content longer than 100 characters.
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. So, there is something happening again and that form is repetitive. But it’s hard to reinvent that form and I think this next generation is looking for ways to tell their own stories that service their own sort of collective ADHD.
I for one, refuse to believe that people are tired of superheroes as well, I think they are simply tired of the way the stories are told. The most common complaint in the community is likewise, the lessening quality of the stories. They are for the most part soulless, generic, bland, and pushing a certain agenda, people are slowly waking up to this reality, and formulaic mass-produced content would no longer do well.
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