The box office figures for 2018 made all too clear that superhero fatigue has yet to set in for the filmgoing public, but according to X-Men producer Lauren Shuler Donner, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige may still want to be mindful of the risks of taking their comic book saga too far.
Speaking at the TCAs on Monday, the producer of the upcoming Dark Phoenix warned Marvel that there’s a limit to how many franchises people will be willing to follow at once:
“You cannot have too many Marvel, X-Men superhero movies out there: We’ll cancel each other out. Each one has to be distinctive. You have The Avengers to follow through; there are so many distinctive canons to follow through and you have to have new ones to focus on. For us, it’s a lot and people will get sick of them. We have to be careful; he (Kevin) has to be careful. You can’t have more than four (franchises out there).”
So far, Marvel Studios have displayed good judgment in giving the public what they want. Even back when 2012’s The Avengers was in the works, there were many who doubted that such an elaborate project that tied together the events of several different movies could prove a hit. Since then, the MCU has got considerably bigger and more complex, but the public has shown themselves time and time again to be along for the ride. The trend looks to continue with Avengers: Endgame, which serves as the culmination point for over a decade of Marvel movies and seems practically destined to be the highest grossing film of 2019.
By the end of this year, the Marvel universe will have expanded even further thanks to the upcoming Disney Plus platform, and with the Disney/Fox merger soon to come into effect, the studio is on the verge of acquiring the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and a whole load more superhero properties that Feige presumably has plans to bring to screens.
But while it goes without saying that the superhero genre won’t always be as big as it is right now, 2019 is currently looking on course to be another huge year for Marvel, starting with the release of Captain Marvel next month. As for Shuler Donner, her next comic book venture Dark Phoenix is due to hit theaters on June 7th.