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Hear Me Out: Marvel is trying to meme itself back to popularity
Whether you’re an ardent comic-book fan or a mere cinema lover who tends to avoid the high-flying antics of such iconic superheroes as Spider-Man and Thor, it doesn’t take an industry insider to recognise that the Marvel train appears to be running out of steam. Whilst it’s only been three years since the mammoth success of Avengers: Endgame, the Disney juggernaut is failing to gain the traction it once had.
Just why this is happening is a wider question that has no simple answer, but it is certainly becoming clear that after 14 years of industry dominance, audiences are simply becoming bored of the familiar Marvel formula. Releasing a number of tentpole releases throughout the year, Marvel supports such big hitters as Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy with a network of content, including TV shows and cartoons that feed into one cinematic behemoth.
Mixing one-part comedy with two parts of action before finishing off the potion with a tantalising post-credit sequence and Disney has created a formula that has been used time and time again for consistent box-office results. Despite so much having changed in the universe since the release of Iron Man in 2008, it’s remarkable just how similar each film feels to the one that precedes it, making the whole franchise feel like one elongated TV series rather than an adaptive movie series.
Though, with the release of Avengers: Endgame, this reliable formula became trickier to implement, as the likes of Iron Man and Captain America departed the franchise for good (?). Ever since, Marvel has failed to gather much steam, with only the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home piquing the genuine interest among a bevvy of content that has included Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022.
In the latter in particular, a certain smell of desperation pervaded, with the usual consistency of Taika Waititi being spoiled by shoe-horned franchise requirements as well as a stale form of comedy that felt long-expired. Relying on ‘random’ meme humour from the dawn of the internet culture, Waititi’s overuse of the screaming goats in Love and Thunder represented one of the many ways in which Marvel was trying to meme itself back into popularity.
Evidence of such can be found far more recently in the Disney+ series She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, in which much discourse has been generated from the twerking scene involving Tatiana Maslany’s protagonist and the real-life American rapper Megan Thee Stallion. In a transparent effort to seem ‘modern’, ‘cool’, and ‘relevant’, Marvel tagged this much-discussed scene onto the end of episode three and has been spreading it on social media ever since.
Go even further back, and evidence of this can be found in Spider-Man: No Way Home as the three versions of the titular character do a double-take of each other, recreating the famous meme. It also can’t be ignored that Marvel’s related kin, Star Wars, has also been utilising a similar formula, using the highly-memed moment of Revenge of the Sith, when Obi-Wan says ‘hello there’ as the final line of their most recent TV show.
Ultimately, memes are the product of fandom, with such celebrated moments created organically by legions of followers who love the show. These moments cannot be fabricated, designed or forced; such merely dilutes the content and makes the business intentions behind any particular intellectual property transparent, making the show or movie worse in the long run.
