One can imagine the conversations about Secret Invasion in the Marvel offices. The conviction of being before a commercial treasure when pronouncing lines like “the protagonist is Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury”, “it will be an adult thriller about an alien invasion on Earth” and, later, “we have convinced Olivia Colman to join”. The ingredients were top-notch and, since they recycle mythology from the comics, the Skrull race was a good base, considering that they had been featured in Captain Marvel, a film that had been a hit in theaters because of the desire to see a Marvel production headed by a powerful woman (and, curiously, what to do with Brie Larson hasn’t quite been known).
But, instead of being a television phenomenon, or at least focusing the serial conversation on a summer without clear protagonists (The Witcher could almost be renamed the Silent Wizard), Secret Invasion is settling for being criticized or, what is worse, ignored. The only discussion around it has to do with the credit titles created by an AI when precisely scriptwriters and actors are on strike due to the precariousness of the sector and the threat posed by this technology. In short, this Skrull conspiracy can be added as yet another example of the failed television drift of Marvel Studios, which has not yet found its The Mandalorian or its Andor, which justify the Star Wars television adventure despite disasters like Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett.
It is difficult to predict, for the record, what the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the UCM) would be without television production. It is possible that he found himself at the same current fragile point, marked by the fatigue of the viewer who interprets superheroic releases as paperwork, disappointing at the box office with the third part of Ant-Man and with his inability to build a common narrative for the different characters.
It’s still ironic. Marvel productions have never been more interrelated than they are now, but that common epic of the Avengers films, which reconciled the different natures (and colors and genders) of characters such as Thor, Captain America, Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Ant-Man and above all an Iron Man who acted as glue with the charisma of Robert Downey Jr as leader, was not backbone. It was without a doubt one of the most successful studio operations in movie history.
But, after the memorable meeting of the characters in Endgame, the public did like superheroes: emancipate themselves from their sense of duty and disperse. The new stage, although it has a follow-up, still has problems establishing itself as a necessary and well-planned extension despite having released more than a dozen productions. What had been interpreted as fun, a solid plan, comes to be seen as a commercial procedure made of anecdotal productions. Although, let’s face it, this is what Marvel has always been when you consider how formulaic their movies were, how forgettable the fights were, how strict the managers were about prohibiting any alteration of the structure.
In this sense, it must be recognized that phase 4 had two very pleasant surprises that go beyond the individual titles of the first decade: Shang-Chi’s imaginary with a couple of well-planned action scenes (and with Simu Liu and Awkwafina offering the best comic tandem in the MCU) and the existentialist tone that Chloé Zhao was able to imprint on The Eternals. Those who consider the film a failed project are buying into the anti-creative spirit of the Marvel offices, where any hint of originality or personality is crushed with the determination of someone who wants to kill a cockroach in the kitchen.
In the midst of this creative and commercial crisis, television fiction has only contributed to the fatigue with works that are interrelated (sometimes symbolically), with little substance on their own and often conveying a prejudice: that television is inferior, that it can go beyond the basic principles of the medium and that, therefore, the productions are riddled with basic errors.
You just have to remember how flat the secondary characters of Scarlet Witch and Vision were or a final fight articulated in a way that was as predictable as it was forced; the way in which Loki lost the most interesting element of him, the recreation of a temporary pro-Soviet bureaucracy, to delve into intergalactic adventures at half throttle; the dilution of Ms Marvel, who after a visual feast in the first episode, exploring her own language, rushed to tell a plot in fits and starts.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier was an elongated buddy-movie where in the first episode the colleagues were not even reunited, forgetting a fundamental principle of the pilot episodes as tools to communicate the tone of the story; Hawkeye, effective, served to give the green light to the least requested spin-off to date, that of Echo; and She-Hulk could have fun reading meta-Marvel but it didn’t work as a sitcom or adventure of the week, always airing underdeveloped episodes.
Secret Invasion, after these exercises to keep adults subscribed to the Disney service, has fallen among the audience like a brick as heartless as the credits. How can someone like Samuel L. Jackson spend over a decade playing the same character and, when he finally has weight in a production, come up with such a poor dramatic arc? How can part of the drama be sustained in the death of a character who, despite being recurring and having a face semi-known to the public, was basically nothing? Why, when Marvel tries to go adult by getting into the thriller of conspiracies and body snatchers, the dialogues transmit the naturalness of a dialogue written by artificial intelligence? And why do scripts have so little interest in drawing characters beyond “with a six and a four here is your portrait”? The miniseries conveys that feeling of lack of guts beyond a reflection on the refugee crisis. They wanted to make a Marvelian Homeland without betting on the adult or understanding what makes political thrillers work and are addictive. As with most of the brand’s series, it is content to be a long film without adapting to the requirements of the medium (which are virtues!).
And, with so much money-making operation where writers and directors behave like audiovisual officials, the Marvel experience has eroded. Because it was one thing to go to the movies and see works as insipid as they were carefree and entertaining, which on the big screen and with a lot of noise hid their shortcomings, and another is to find yourself with a tangle of Marvel mythology with half-baked characters and always incomplete plots, because the arcs of the characters often neither begin nor end in the work in question. From producing so much, it has been revealed that the king was naked due to the mistaken conviction that, between films, the viewer really needed Marvelian hobbies instead of paving the way for expectation. The spectacular cannot be perceived as routine.
Put to dedicate hours and hours to the series to have the complete portrait of the MCU, at least the works could transmit a certain energy, as if the people behind them had a pulse. We complain about the credits of Secret Invasion when the reality is that almost all of Marvel post-Endgame seems like a draft taken from ChatGPT and, when Sony’s animated Spider-Man suddenly appears, one is reminded of grit, uniqueness, risk and above all trust in the viewer.