For any sane production franchise, whether it be the impossibly large storytelling machine of Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe or the underrated Hollywood faction of indie features, the success rate is only calculated by its critical and audience reception. The entire film industry runs on the frazzled excitement and enthusiasm of its fans toward a certain project and it seems as though Marvel consciously chucked that theory out the window when it stepped off the glorious experience that was Endgame.
Kevin Feige Finds Respite in the Freedom of Phase Four
Kevin Feige has essentially treated the MCU Phase Four as the resident Knowhere of the Marvel Studios oeuvre. Every halted project or script that was undercut in favor of more arc-driven plots that are central to the narrative was brought and dumped here. Anything that seemed too extraordinary, eccentric, and idiosyncratic was given a free pass and the writers and directors seemed to treat Phase Four like a space where the most tangentially digressive stories could be made to come true, especially with the resources that Marvel gave to them.
The only problem with this plan? The audience wasn’t made aware of it otherwise perhaps the reception to it would be a bit different. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kevin Feige claimed in the aftermath of She-Hulk: Attorney At Law‘s launch at Disney+:
“She-Hulk, for example, was an experiment: ‘Let’s just do a legal comedy.’ What if Ally McBeal was a superhero? How do we do a legal sitcom with an incredibly expensive CG character in the middle of every episode? And I couldn’t be happier with the tone that Jessica Gao has set for that. It’s a very different tone than many of other projects have, and that was totally intentional.”
It is also important to note that although by the final episode, the writers and production team behind the show was able to get their point across (about Marvel trolls and the entire meta bit), the viewership by then had already dwindled to the lowest of the low, and the hate that the show had been getting in the beginning for intentionally testing the fans with She-Hulk began to slow down because hardly anyone was caught up in the story by then.
Perhaps if the dialogue between Marvel and its audience about female empowerment and the harsh socio-cultural reception to a female superhero in a predominantly male business was sold less as a dislocated comedy and more in sync with MCU’s mainstream tone, She-Hulk could have actually worked out in favor of everybody involved and not just been a project for kicks on Feige and the She-Hulk team’s part.
Kevin Feige’s Crazed Take on the Art of Creative Liberty
For Kevin Feige, the entirety of Marvel Phase Four was an extended intro into the land of the weird and the unexplored. With a fandom such as this and a litany of IPs to choose from, MCU’s transition from the Infinity Saga to the Multiverse Saga is a lesson on successfully testing the limits of your audience while also having fun with the new popular culture trends of today. A mixture of all things profoundly uncharacteristic of Marvel dropped onto our laps in the span of two years and the world gasped at the largest production rate of films, series, and genre-exploring 40-minute specials by a single franchise ever attempted.
By the end of 2022, the constant conveyor of the production line paused to give way to Feige’s plans for the mainstream theatrical Marvel saga. But in the process, the damage that was caused by manufacturing a need to constantly deliver a good spectacle on the screens has on one hand given birth to “Marvel fatigue” and on the other, driving the audience to a point of addiction where an extended gap between two projects seems an abhorrent thought to consider.
She-Hulk: Attorney At Law is now streaming on Disney+
Source: Entertainment Weekly
