By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | October 10, 2024 |
It’s easy to rag on the MCU. The cinematic universe has existed for over 16 years. It’s had glorious ups and painful downs. In recent years, the painful stuff has become harder to ignore. Rushed schedules and a flooded market have produced more bland, unfinished-looking entries for the powerhouse’s library. Still, they have bright spots with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and, more recently, Agatha All Along. They are also still a box office draw, with Deadpool & Wolverine bringing in over a billion dollars.
The box office part is important. There are downsides to a mega-corporation being one of the biggest driving forces behind movie theater success. However, something has to. The business is not the same anymore. There is not as diverse and full a slate of films released each year, at least not on a grand scale. There is likely an argument to be made that Marvel is more than partially responsible for this change, but I’ve barely had any coffee this morning.
What matters is, for now, the MCU’s existence helps keep lights on in movie theaters and therefore gets us more movies. You can still see things like I Saw The TV Glow and Blackberry in the theater, and while they may not move global box office numbers, the theaters can still play them because something is doing that. As I write this and have more coffee, my annoyance with Marvel grows. They are a solution to a problem they caused! Let’s see what Sebastian Stan has to say about the whole thing.
Stan recently had a chat with GQ and was not shy in his support for Feige’s MCU. “I’ve never been part of a company that puts so much heart and thought into anything,” he gushed about his longtime employer. “I think if Marvel was gone, it’d be such a big hole to try and fill up. Don’t just go out there and s*** on something without offering something better.”
He is not wrong. I don’t know what would fill the hole left by Marvel Studios. Maybe it doesn’t need to be filled? But it likely would at this point. While that can be frustrating, I do appreciate that Stan supports the smaller fish as much as he supports the big ones. He is no stranger to independent film. Small, strange, dark movies are made because Stan is willing to be in them. That’s huge!
Stan is not the only MCU member doing so either. Robert Downey Jr. is in a new play on Broadway. Chris Evans has been in films like Snowpiercer. Scarlett Johansson appeared in Under the Skin. Some people have used the MCU to support the rest of the ecosystem directly. Sebastian Stan is one of them. So, I’ll give him this.