The future of Marvel movies is in adding teen girls to Doctor Strange

The House of Mouse absorbed House of Ideas, the shocking news for comics fans came on August 31 2009. The $4 billion dollar deal between Disney and Marvel Entertainment was just as surprising to those who followed corporate moving and shaking — but news stories quickly formed a consensus narrative. The New York Times, Guardian, Forbes and Forbes all agreed that Marvel Entertainment would bring Disney an audience they were struggling to attract.

Speaking to Newsweek, Disney chief financial officer Tom Staggs put it in plain language: “We both have properties with broad appeal, but [Marvel properties] skew more toward boys.”

More than a decade down the line, with Marvel Studios dominating the entire mood of franchise cinema, Marvel Entertainment and its mousy parent are reaping what they’ve sown. In 2022, the teens of 2009 will look very different from the young people of 2020. The future of Marvel Studios is in clawing back the youth audience, but this time, they’ve got a different plan. After a decade of drought, a certain kind of superhero is quietly cropping up in nearly every upcoming film on the company’s slate.

Marvel Cinematic Universe has a pivotal role for girls.

Biff! Pow! Comic book movies aren’t just for boys anymore

Image: Marvel Studios

Marvel sequels often expand their casts by adding on more heroes — Black Widow and War Machine in Iron Man 2In: The Falcon, the Winter Soldier and The Winter Soldier of Captain AmericaThe Wasp In Ant-Man and The Wasp. Marvel’s Phase Four (that is, everything from Black Widow On) makes that tendency a standard. The rule? Add a superheroine. Ideal, one for teens.

Black Widow has already introduced a younger legacy character with Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, and Eternals not only chose a female character, Sersi, from the ensemble group of comic book demigods as its lead — it also gender-bent the eternally teenage character, Sprite, who until the film had always been depicted in comics as male.

Of Marvel Studios’ upcoming feature films with release dates, only one (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3() so far has declined to create a new superheroine. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of MadnessThe MCU will be welcoming America Chavez, the Latinx, queer character, to its ranks, into the MCU. Thor: Love and Thunder will feature Natalie Portman’s unexpected return to the franchise to play Jane Foster’s ascension to the role of Thor. Even without Chadwick Boseman’s untimely death, Wakanda Forever: Black Panther would likely still have leaned into the breakout popularity of Letitia Wright’s Shuri, but the film will also debut Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, a Black teen girl who reverse engineers Iron Man’s armor to become the hero Ironheart. MarvelsCarol Danvers and two other superheroines will be joined by them in their Disney Plus debuts. Ant-Man & The Wasp: QuantumaniaThey will be able to attract Big Little Lies’ Kathryn Newton as the third actress to play the hero’s daughter, and the first to actually put on her super suit as fellow shrinking hero Stinger.

Things are much the same in Marvel’s rush to bring TV series to the Disney Plus service. WandaVision shone a light on the MCU Avengers’ second female recruit, and introduced Teyonah Parris as Pulsar. LokiIt introduced Lady Loki in its own way, HawkeyeEcho and Kate Bishop were brought to the screen. And the company’s future television slate is — when compared to previous output — It is shocking! female-led. Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Ironheart, Echo, House of Harkness – Agatha, an untitled series featuring Danai Gurira’s Okoye are all on the board.

It’s a vigorous heel turn from a franchise that, in its first decade, had produced only two television shows (Agent Carter and Jessica Jones) with a woman as the sole title character, and didn’t make a single woman-lead feature film. It’s a show of faith for Marvel Comics’ deep well of diverse characters, many of whom are no more obscure than Iron Man was before the year 2008, and a show of faith that many fans have been demanding for over a decade.

However, we shouldn’t take this to mean that the company has given up on its customers. What’s actually happening here is a company bowing to the reality that the audience it neglected in the last decade is the one it needs to survive.

There are new kids in town

Image: Marvel Studios

There’s a certain amount of bullshit bandwidth that should be given to any research into generational trends. But whether or not the generalizations of such research are true, they’re still the generalizations that Disney and Marvel have to work with. A growing number of studies on the cohorts of the elderly Zoomers are coming up with the same results as before.

Research shows Gen Z has a higher tolerance for diversity, is more open to gender spectrums and is more queer- and queer-friendly than previous generations. Gen Z is not tolerant of being taken advantage of, particularly by corporates. They also expect brands to have social responsibility and to show loyalty.

What’s more, there’s their recency bias. Many millennials are nostalgic for a time in which a good superhero movie was rare and an established franchise. This is practically impossible. Everybody. Batman BeginsThere was also a Superman ReturnsWe are here for you. X-MenOr Spider-ManIt was X-Men – The Last StandOr a Spider-Man III. But Hollywood’s repeated attempts to create interconnected film franchises are the mass media environment in which Gen Z became aware of the existence of mass media. When they were only in their teens, the oldest ones of them were still young. Iron Man You can see the movie in theaters. The youngest might even share a birthday. The Winter Soldier: Captain America.

Superheroes aren’t the shiny new thing to them — they are the default edifice of cinema. The cohort was media-literate, and many were heavily online. Many of these online fandoms, which were dominated by women and queer people, grew around Marvel Cinematic Universe, were met with decades of awkward silence. While the oldest millennials had bowdlerized translations as a child, Sailor Moon, Gen Z’s middle-grade television landscape has offered them the diverse worlds of Avatar: Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, She-Ra, and Disney’s own Owl House. Gen Z is watching Disney’s repeated stumbles. They’re even protesting them.

Marvel Studios needs to come up with fresh ideas in order to attract a younger generation to the MCU. Millennials are now older and more interested than ever. A Avengers lineup of only five white males and one female isn’t going to work. Marvel Studios is fortunate to have the following: ActualHouse of Ideas.

Marvel, now

Image: Russell Dauterman/Marvel Comics

Marvel Studios was busy creating the Infinity Saga. But superhero comics were still evolving. Perhaps the oddest shock of going back to of-the-moment reporting on Disney’s Marvel acquisition is remembering the 2009 industry perception of both companies. There are many articles that note this. Hannah Montana as Disney’s headline product, and almost all define the vibe of Marvel Comics as “tough” or “grim.”

Needless to say, those perceptions have changed — not least because Disney is now the house of not only Marvel but Star Wars, The Simpsons, It’s Always Sunny in PhiladelphiaThese include the Alien- and Predator Franchises to name but a few. Marvel Comics is also changing.

Brain Bendis, Sarah Pichelli and Sarah Pichelli founded Miles Morales two years later in 2009. Dexter Soy and Kelly Sue DeConnick created a reimagining for Captain Marvel in 2012 with Jamie McKelvie, Jamie McKelvie, Kelly Sue DeConnick. Kamala Khan became the new Ms. Marvel after editors Sana Amanat (and Stephen Wacker), writer G. Willow Wilson and Jamie McKelvie worked together. The Young Avengers were also modernized by McKelvie and Kieron Gillen in the same year. They now have a nearly all-queer cast. Rick Remender and Carlos Pacheco gave Sam Wilson Captain America’s title in 2014. Stuart Immonen, Stuart Immonen, and Stuart Emmonen did the same. Russell Dauterman, Jason Aaron, and Jane Foster were made Thor that year.

And that’s just the first half of the decade. Laura Kinney was elected to the office in 2015. The Wolverine in Tom Taylor, David López, and David Navarrot’s All-New Wolverine. In 2016, Jennifer Walters took the title role in Mariko Tamaki and Nico Leon’s Hulk series. Bendis and Mike Deodato also debuted Riri as Ironheart that year.

Writing, editing, and art directors on these stories were often subject to vicious harassment in an effort to discipline creators of different comics. And it is now precisely that work that Marvel Studios is turning to for the billion-dollar movies and shows of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase Four, often with just a “thanks” in passing. Between WandaVision (Demiurge, Speed). Loki (Kid Loki), Hawkeye (Kate Bishop), Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (America Chavez) alone, Marvel Studios has introduced five of the members of Gillen and McKelvie’s Young AvengersThere are options to add Shuri (Cassie Lang), Ironheart (Eli Bradley), Patriot (Eli Bradley), and Stinger (Cassie Lang).

This is no accident. Marvel Studios’ POC-led franchises like Black Panther, Shang-ChiA new version of the site is available. Captain AmericaAre already being considered. Queer-adjacent films are clearly an arena Disney prefers not to consider, which may explain why it’s been five years since Marvel Studios recouped the film license to the overwhelmingly popular and heavily queer-coded X-Men franchise without a peep of a new film. The future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe lies in Disney’s ability to gain the loyalty of the most progressive and skeptical generation yet, and there is only one “safe,” new axis of diversity for Marvel Studios to lean into: Women.