‘Avengers: Endgame’ Directors Blame Decline Of MCU On Shorter Attention Spans Of Younger Audiences: “This Next Generation Is Looking For Ways To Tell Their Own Stories That Service Their Own Sort Of Collective ADHD”
According to Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame directorial duo Joe and Anthony Russo, the ongoing decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not the fault of bad storytelling, the franchise’s lack of overall direction, or its continued bastardization of its comic book source material, but rather the ever-shortening attention spans of younger audiences.
The Russos, who in addition to their work closing out The Infinity Saga also helmed Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War, weighed in on the ongoing debate regarding the failing health of the MCU while speaking with GamesRadar+’s Emily Murray during the recent Sands: International Film Festival.
Asked directly by Murray if they had any thoughts on the franchise’s ongoing, post-Endgame drop in quality, Joe opined that the main catalyst for this decline was not the films themselves, but the changing viewing habits of audiences, particularly younger ones.
“I think it’s a reflection of the current state of everything,” said Joe. “It’s difficult right now, it’s an interesting time. I think we’re in a transitional period and people don’t know quite yet how they’re going to receive stories moving forward, or what kinds of stories they’re going to want.”
“There’s a big generational divide about how you consume media,” he further argued. “There’s a generation that’s used to appointment viewing and going to a theater on a certain date to see something, but it’s ageing out. Meanwhile the new generation are ‘I want it now, I want to process it now’, then moving onto the next thing, which they process whilst doing two other things at the same time. You know, it’s a very different moment in time than it’s ever been. And so I think everyone, including Marvel, is experiencing the same thing, this transition. And I think that really is probably what’s at play more than anything else.”
To this end, Joe then noted that this ‘generational divide’ was not an entertainment-specific problem, but one that is currently affecting the entirety of world culture.
“We have never collectively, globally, processed our conversation so intimately and quickly as we do now,” he asserted. “I think that creates problems, where we over-process and don’t care about context anymore. We communicate through memes and headlines, with nobody reading past two sentences, so everything’s 100 characters or less – or 10-second videos on social media you swipe through. I think that the two-hour format, the structure that goes into making a movie, it’s over a century old now and everything always transitions.”
“So, there is something happening again and that form is repetitive,” he added. “But it’s hard to reinvent that form and I think this next generation is looking for ways to tell their own stories that service their own sort of collective ADHD.”
To this end, the brothers then agreed that while the superhero genre is on the decline at the box office, this is due to a general ‘Hollywood interest’ cycle, not any sort of ‘superhero fatigue’.
“I think it’s fatigue in general,” declared Anthony. “The superhero fatigue question was around long before the work we were doing. So, it’s sort of an eternal complaint, like we always used to cite this back in our early days with superhero work. People used to complain about westerns in the same way but they lasted for decades and decades and decades. They were continually reinvented and brought to new heights as they went on.”
As of writing, the next entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Deadpool & Wolverine, is currently set to slice-and-dice its way into theaters on July 26th.
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