the struggles the MCU has faced over the last six years, as well as plans for the future.
The goal for a while now has been lower budgets, fewer projects, and higher quality. That strategy led to one of the franchise’s biggest critical successes in years when “Thunderbolts” was released in May. Unfortunately, the box office didn’t keep up with the acclaim.
“‘Thunderbolts*’ I thought was a very, very good movie,” Feige said while speaking with the press (per Variety). “But nobody knew that title and many of those characters were from a [TV] show.” Feige is likely pretty on the money here. John Walker (Wyatt Russell) had only previously appeared in “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” for instance, and several other characters — Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Taskmaster (Olya Kurylenko) — were from “Black Widow,” one of the lesser-seen MCU movies.
A general loss of faith in the MCU after several lackluster projects may have also played a role, of course. “Some [audiences] were still feeling that notion of, ‘I guess I had to have seen these other shows to understand who this is,'” Feige said. “If you actually saw the movie, that wouldn’t be the case, and we make the movie so that’s not the case. But I think we still have to make sure the audience understands that.”
