Marvel's Kevin Feige Knows Exactly What Went Wrong With The MCU After Avengers: Endgame

As part of the Wall Street Journal's assessment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's recent woes, several sources close to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige have revealed his take on what led to the franchise's loss of revenue and interest in recent years. The answer is a no-brainer, but it's also something we haven't exactly heard Disney and Marvel's top brass fess up to very often until now: over-saturation.

According to the WSJ report, the Marvel Studios boss and mastermind thinks that a surplus of interconnected MCU shows and movies, which required viewers to tune in both at home and in theaters with increasing frequency, are to blame for the property's downturn. The outlet points to Disney's "hunger for content" for Disney+ as a primary reason the MCU started feeling like a chore. It also acknowledges that the overwhelming amount of titles to watch didn't just exhaust fans of the franchise but also the folks who worked on the projects.

"The strategy became just expansion, expansion, expansion," a former Marvel employee said of a post-"Avengers: Endgame" meeting in which Disney's Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger made the programming goals for Disney+ known. Iger has since admitted that this strategy didn't work, saying in 2023 that, "Not only did [Marvel] increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention." By 2024, Iger was telling shareholders that Marvel's Disney+ slate would go down to "probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four" and that Disney and Marvel would "reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three."

This strategy shift may have seemed slow for fans, many of whom had become worn out by Marvel since the early days of Disney+. It also came after Iger initially seemed keen to categorize Marvel's problems (like the box office failure of "The Marvels") as one-off missteps. For his part, sources close to Feige have said he agreed to the initial plan because he was eager for the opportunities to tell Marvel stories that hadn't made the leap from the comic book page to the screen yet, adding that he wanted to be an "excellent corporate citizen."

The WSJ report also notes that Marvel employees were well aware of what they called "Marvel fatigue" and wondered openly if they'd built a "no new fans club" by making newer MCU films and shows so heavily interconnected as to require prerequisite viewing. Staffers also recalled working on projects for weeks before being able to get time with Feige, who would sometimes then request changes that couldn't be incorporated on a tight deadline. The piece says that Feige's annual Palm Springs MCU planning meeting in 2023 was "somber," but it also notes that there's a new strategy for the MCU: fewer titles, multiple seasons, and less convoluted crossovers, with Feige devoting most of his time to the films. 

Up next for the MCU is "Ironheart," which is due out on Disney+ on June 24, 2025. "Thunderbolts*," which has been framed by some as Marvel's potential comeback vehicle, is now in theaters.