Marvel wants that ‘A24-feeling’ — but it’ll take more than A24 talent

There’s been a lot of fuss over what’s next for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and not all in ways that Marvel would like. A few years after Kevin Feige publicly stated Marvel was cracking down and prioritizing what would “stand out and stand above,” the results have been a bit shaky. There wasn’t much by way of Marvel movie releases in 2024, and certainly not any that advanced the core MCU-phase-driven plot elements. The TV shows have more or less contained themselves, without changing too much about the power structure of the MCU. This year started off with Captain America: Brave New World, which felt rickety as both a personal and political journey and ultimately didn’t do much to make the next installments sound all that enticing.

So there’s a lot riding on Thunderbolts*, the next MCU movie, due in early May. And Marvel appears to want to sell this as something more than just Marvel: This week, Florence Pugh (who will return as Yelena in Thunderbolts*) claimed the movie is an “A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes.” Then, later in the week, film-review app Letterboxd released an exclusive teaser cut with film buffs in mind, highlighting the cinematic pedigree of those involved with the film.

There’s a lot of exciting connections to point out — the film is chocked full of good actors! Written and directed by those behind Netflix’s Beef! It shares creative crew with The Green Knight, Hereditary, Minari, and Everything Everywhere All at Once! But, in the grand tradition of trailers recut to use editing and energy to make one thing look like another, history suggests the end result will be Thunderbolts*, a Marvel movie.

And it should be. There doesn’t have to be anything inherently wrong with that. There was a time when a new Marvel movie could excite the masses, even when the aims, methods, and outcomes of it were going to be largely what you expected. When Phase 1 Marvel was in full swing, it was about letting creatives take a stab at wrestling with the specific tone and needs of a movie; Joss Whedon’s Avengers has little of the same tone as Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. Where they did cross over was the grand Marvel ambition, the shared universe built across a few movies and thousands of comics.

A handful of MCU phases later, a Marvel movie still basically feels like “largely what you expected.” It doesn’t matter if I know what the villain of Thunderbolts* looks like from a Funko reveal after the trailer seemed to be intentionally cut around a full costume reveal, because too often I already know the moves. There’s not a lot of personality to differentiate these heroes anymore, just some genre conventions — often even those are subsumed into the Marvel machine.

But making a distinctive, interesting work is more than just gathering up a bunch of interesting people and letting them play with house money. They have to be able to do their thing (which is all before we even consider that people contain multitudes that they bring to their projects; George Miller did not bring the same frenzied ferociousness to Babe that he brought to the Mad Max series, which is the right choice for that project!). Marvel can pull in as many pop stars and Oscar-winning actors and directors and A24-bonafides as they want. But if the studio wants to up the ante, its creatives need to play.