Last fall, I made a post titled What if it's not "superhero fatigue," but "long running series fatigue"? In it, I predicted that The Marvels "won't tank like Quantumania, but it won't hit quite as big as Guardians 3."

That obviously didn't work out. However, I have a new theory that may turn out to be just as wrong!

In the first decade of the MCU, once a character made their debut, they would pop up once a year or so. Sometimes less frequently, but rarely would two entire years pass. Periodically, a large number of characters would appear in the same film, usually with “Avengers” in the title.

But when you look at the Multiverse Saga, years go by between character appearances. We still haven't seen Shang-Chi again, for example. Captain Marvel had only one, post-credit cameo between Endgame and The Marvels.

Aggravating this is the massive increase in output from Marvel Studios. Thirteen characters were introduced in Phases 4 & 5, and most of them have only had a single appearance. (Granted, 2021 was an outlier, essentially releasing the projects that had been delayed in 2020 simultaneously with the 2021 films; but even taking delays into account, that's a huge number of characters to introduce with no follow up.)

One of Marvel’s biggest mistakes, in my opinion, is skipping the Avengers films for Phases Four and Five. Most of these new characters have never even met each other. We've been missing both major cross-over events and minor guest appearances. The gaps in appearances are huge, both in real-world time and in screentime.

We like these characters. We want to see them, hang out with them again. A couple year gap is enough to make us miss them, especially with two or three projects in between. "Yeah, Ragnarok was fun, but what's Cap been up to since he broke everyone out of prison in Civil War?"

Marvels vs Deadpool & Wolverine

But wait, isn’t The Marvels exactly the kind of crossover the Multiverse Saga needs? Not exactly.

The headliner, Captain Marvel, hadn't been seen in several years. I think it's also worth noting that she wasn't even really herself in that first film, having been brainwashed and memory wiped until the end of the movie. The other two Marvels were the lead of a very unpopular Disney series, and a tertiary character from another series that was nearly three years old.

Deadpool and Wolverine is the exact opposite. These are well-known, well-loved characters that we hadn't seen in a long while. Long enough to miss them, but not forget about them.

This same principal holds for Spider-Man: No Way Home, which brought back earlier iterations of Spider-Man, who many fans grew up with. The gap since we last saw Maguire and Garfield as Spiders-Men could’ve had a negative affect on box office, except for the secret MCU ingredient—new and unexpected character interactions. See different iterations of Peter Parker bounce off each other was novel and fun.

^{For anyone who's interested, this is a condensed version of an article I wrote on my Substack}, ^{which also includes a chart delineating every major character appearance in the MCU, plus an interview with Kevin Feige where he explains his philosophy of sequels.}