Its content has reshaped not only culture, not only the market, but imagination itself. Solo and The Rise of Skywalker failed at the box office like so many of the MCU’s imitators, because of an inability to grasp what the MCU and its content is exactly, even though the answer is so clear, apparent, and simple: The MCU is awesome. I use “awesome” in the terrifying “peasant beholding a Biblically accurate angel” sense here, as the everythingness of the MCU – both within the text and in the world – should and does inspire trouser-wetting, knee-buckling awe. Either way, the loop spawns deformed bastard sons like Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Morbius with a nauseating regularity. Other Hollywood blockbusters have spent over a decade trying to replicate the MCU, throwing everything into a feedback loop of “anything you can do I can do better”, be it attempts to replicate the shared universe formulae to varying degrees of success – RIP Universal’s Dark Universe, we hardly knew ye – or the way in which 90 percent of modern blockbusters have taken on the MCU’s aesthetic, a flat digital appearance that resembles the washed-out colours of a concrete parking lot. Sometimes, if you stop and think hard enough, you realise that a relatively peripheral character like Doctor Strange raking in so much money would have been considered extremely, well, strange 15 (or even ten!) years ago, but we live in a time when characters and franchises once as obscure as Steve Ditko himself now have the pull of an Ethan Hunt or Ghostbusters. Multiverse of Madness’s global box office has hit $690 million as of writing, putting it at 16th place in the list of MCU’s box-office winners. This simple equation has raked in over $25 billion dollars for Marvel, Disney and the various remora (Paramount, Universal, etc) that exist in its ecosystem. Its mere presence allows the proliferation of more content, be it fan fiction, YouTuber easter egg listicles, or articles like this one – the beauty of the MCU’s content moloch is that it feeds into the great ocean of content that fills our every waking minute online and off, a great big reciprocal laundry of ideas and images that bloom and bust as blips of light on the infinite horizon of digital media. It doesn’t matter how or why something appears, just so long as it does, reducing it to the importance of a fan Wiki stub, as much a part of the MCU canon as Mjolnir or Howard the Duck. Be it a gay kiss chopped for release in some Middle Eastern countries, a CIA agent teaming up with our hero to overthrow an African ruler or ending half the life in the universe with a click of your fingers, there is an irreverence to what this content claims to represent that has a whiff of the listicle to it. There’s the sense that any of it can be cut out or pasted in without the viewer feeling much of anything. In the MCU, ideas and identities are represented in the same way the idea of Snap, Crackle, and Pop are represented on a cereal box. It is smoothed down, plasticised and drained so that it can fit harmlessly alongside the MCU’s representation of mass death ( Avengers: Age of Ultron), black radicalism ( Black Panther) and PTSD ( The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) another token placeholder in a blank cardboard puzzle. By subsuming something as complicated and multivarious as DID into the MCU, the complexities of representation (in the old, artistic sense of the word) are made immediately irrelevant. Whether or not Moon Knight’s representation of the disorder is truthful or accurate or silly is ultimately irrelevant. Take, for instance, the Disney+ show Moon Knight, starring Oscar Isaac playing a character with dissociative identity disorder (DID). The result is something that can be anything to anyone: any meaning you can dream of can be attached to this content, like an accessory snapped onto an action figure. That voicelessness sapped a generation of creatives like a parasite, allowing their content to have a universal blank quality that can be adapted to any topic, any vision, any direction, or any change in the market. The MCU has spent a decade and a half honing its voicelessness.
This is the beauty of a product that holds nothing distinct within it. Be it queer identities, schizoaffective personality disorder, or the Armenian genocide – everything is grist to the content mill.
The brilliance of Disney’s content deluge is the way in which it reshapes everything around it into content also.
It has succeeded so thoroughly that a majority of people find anything that does not feel like content repulsive and off-putting in equal measure, to the point where it sends them into genuine fits of rage, like the Marvel fans who planned to storm Sony headquarters for initially failing to negotiate a deal to keep Spider-Man in the MCU.