What once looked like an unstoppable superhero factory has begun to falter in recent years. Here’s what Marvel could learn from the late Roger Corman.
When Steven Spielberg and George Lucas revolutionised the summer blockbuster in the 1970s, it was often said they essentially took B-movie ideas and made them with A-movie budgets. In Spielberg’s hands, what could have been a schlocky monster flick instead became Jaws; Lucas took inspiration from the flimsy rockets and cardboard sets of Flash Gordon and came up with Star Wars.
In the 21st century, no other studio has perfected the art of elevating B-movies more successfully than Marvel. Superheroes were themselves once dismissed by Hollywood; but over its 35-film strong cinematic universe, Marvel has turned out hit after hit with stories about billionaires in metal suits (Iron Man) gods with enchanted hammers (Thor) and space operas featuring talking raccoons (Guardians Of The Galaxy).
With its interconnected plots and complex action sequences planned years in advance, Marvel is by now akin to an assembly line – one in which numerous films (and more recently TV shows) are at various stages of development at any given time. In more recent years, however, there have been signs that something might be going wrong inside Marvel’s dream factory. Billion-dollar-plus hits have been joined by some noteworthy box office disappointments. Captain America: Brave New World, Marvel’s first film of 2025, was greeted by less-than-glowing reviews.
So what’s happened? Why has a movie-making formula that has worked for over 15 years begun to falter, and what can be done to fix it? It’s just possible that a B-movie pioneer – one who himself took an assembly line approach to filmmaking – might have the answer.
Corman’s World
Across a career lasting seven decades, the late Roger Corman was a filmmaking powerhouse. Specialising in low-budget genre movies, Corman had a particular knack for making his money work for him; he would frequently work with young yet talented writers, directors and cinematographers just starting out in their careers. Joe Dante, James Cameron, Nicolas Roeg, Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Towne all cut their teeth by working for Corman.
Whether he was producing (and sometimes writing and directing) horror, sci-fi or whatever other genre was fashionable at the time, Corman also added a touch of class to his movies by getting in famous actors who were reaching the later stages of their careers: Vincent Price in Corman’s string of vibrant Edgar Allan Poe adaptations; Ray Milland in The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963).
At his various studios, from Palo Alto in the 1950s to New World Pictures later in his career, Corman would often save money by reusing sets, keeping filming schedules tight and having multiple projects at various stages of development. This meant he could shoot a film like A Bucket Of Blood (1959) for about $50,000 over a course of five days, and then recycle the sets for The Little Shop Of Horrors (1960), which he shot in two days for $35,000.
Of his method of filmmaking, Corman once said, perhaps with a wry smile, that “If you couldn’t make it in the automobile industry, you came to Hollywood.”
There are a few parallels between Corman and Marvel Studios’ attitude to movies. Across six phases of its cinematic universe, and some 35 films to date, has perfected its own house style – all bright colours and quippy dialogue – and a factory mindset that Corman himself might have recognised.
And just as Corman could add star power to his movies on a budget by hiring Price and Milland, Marvel built its MCU around Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, who in 2008 had fallen far from his 1980s heartthrob peak, but was still a recognisable name. Most recently, it’s brought in an elder statesman of Hollywood, Harrison Ford, to play the Red Hulk in Captain America: Brave New World.
It’s a similar story with its writers and directors. Although Marvel has hired the odd seasoned pro (Joe Johnston for Captain America: The First Avenger), the greater bulk of its movies have been directed by the likes of Chloe Zhao, Jon Watts, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden – younger filmmakers who’ve made a mark with independent films, but are less versed in making a nine-figure blockbuster full of complicated VFX sequences.
Marvel’s millions
There’s one obvious difference between Corman and Marvel Studios, though. Where Corman made movies for thousands of dollars, Marvel commonly spends hundreds of millions.
What’s more, Marvel’s expenditure on its movies appears to be growing, even as box office returns stagnate. Iron Man made over $500m on a $130m (ish) budget; The Avengers cost more at $220m or so, but it was a cinematic event that brought in some $1.5bn. Recent years have brought mixed fortunes for Marvel; Deadpool & Wolverine dominated cinemas in the summer of 2024, and Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 did well the previous year.
The same can’t be said for Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (2023), a film which made $475m in cinemas. That might not sound too disappointing, but consider the rumoured budget: $330m, and that’s after tax breaks. Add in the cost of marketing, and the figure was perhaps nearer the $400m mark.
The Marvels (2023) did even worse: it made a shade over $200m in cinemas, but cost somewhere north of $300m to make. The amount of money Marvel lost, at least in the short term, must have been considerable.
It remains to be seen how Captain America: Brave New World fares, given that it had a decent opening weekend of around $190m globally, but has been marred by gloomy reviews and some of the worst reactions from movie-goers Marvel has seen so far.
Marvel’s official line is that it spent $180m making Brave New World, directed by Julius Onah (The Cloverfield Paradox); rumour has it that the sum is far higher, and may be more like $380m. This would certainly tally with the stories of drastic reshoots, including the last-minute hiring of Giancarlo Esposito to play an additional villain – his sequences were shot in the spring of 2024, roughly when the movie was originally supposed to be released. Instead, it was pushed back to this February to allow more time for post-production.
Universal appeal
For years, Marvel’s production line of cinematic universe movies worked extraordinarily well. Rival studios attempted to copy the recipe, but none of them got the ingredients quite right; Universal’s Dark Universe of monster movies amounted to a single film (The Mummy) and a solitary group photo that, in hindsight, positively drips with hubris.
Much has already been written about Marvel’s struggles to replicate its own success in the wake of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. How films in the phases since Endgame have struggled to leave the same cultural mark as those that came before it. How branching out into related Disney+ TV shows risked diluting the narrative and giving audiences too much to keep up with.
What’s beginning to become clear – at least from this writer’s perspective – is that Marvel is seeing diminishing returns on its once sure-fire formula. Over the past few years, in particular, its films have become increasingly reliant on visual effects to the point where they barely take place in what we might recognise as the real world. The likes of Iron Man and The Avengers were full of fantastical action, but they were rooted in something that resembled contemporary America.
Quantumania, on the other hand, was filmed almost entirely against green screens. For much of the movie, the only thing that physically exists in front of the camera is an actor’s face – and on occasions, even these look nightmarishly distorted. Just look at what they did to poor Corey Stoll as M.O.D.O.K.
Although audiences flocked to see it, even Deadpool & Wolverine had the sterile look of a film shot against digital backdrops or on sparse sets. It’s arguably one of the ugliest – or at best plain-looking – blockbusters to breach the $1bn mark in recent times.
As Marvel has hired ever greater numbers of visual effects studios – and famously driven down the price of each effects shot – the cracks have begun to show in the films’ visuals. And yet, because each Marvel film is such a production behemoth, budgets are still soaring. Marvel’s habit of shooting footage, evaluating it and getting feedback from test audiences, then going back and rewriting, reshooting and re-editing is both time-consuming and hugely expensive.
Placeholder visuals
There’s also something called previs to consider. Short for pre-visualisation, it’s a process in which a complex action sequence is digitally mapped out – often with placeholder visuals and low-polygon 3D models – on a computer. It’s a process that has been used in one form or another for years across the film industry, but for Marvel, it’s become a key part of its pipeline.
As a 2021 video by Business Insider points out, Marvel has long employed the services of VFX studio The Third Floor for its previs. Of the 23 films released by Marvel Studios up to that point, The Third Floor had worked on 19 of them. What’s more, the number of shots the company has pre-visualised has grown over time, from two-thirds of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier to the entirety of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.
These shots are often worked out years in advance of a movie going into production; in fact, Marvel will now map out every single shot, from small character interactions to city-wrecking action, in advance of a script even being finished. Chris Edwards, The Third Floor’s CEO, praised this process in Business Insider’s mini-documentary.
“That actually is the best place for a professional visualization team […] to be able to make bridges and try out some experiments between departments that have a crazy idea that may or may not work,” he said. “You want to be able to throw things at walls and see if they stick.”
Avengers Assembly
Marvel has therefore pioneered its own digital assembly line – one that prioritises visuals and action set-pieces over writing and direction. And if you aren’t prioritising writing and direction, that means there’s often little room for a filmmaker’s stylistic quirks or the introduction of subtext or theme.
In an eloquently scathing review for RogerEbert.com, Robert Daniels took Captain America: Brave New World to task for refusing to say anything in particular about the state of the US.
“These heroes stand for nothing,” Daniels wrote, “and as such crumble before our eyes as they try to safeguard a milquetoast future born out of a buried fascist past.”
Agreeing to direct a Marvel movie has increasingly meant sacrificing style or individuality for a place on an assembly line. It’s little wonder, then, that some filmmakers have flatly turned down potentially lucrative offers to direct an MCU movie. In 2018, Argentine director Lucrecia Martel revealed that she’d been invited to direct Black Widow, and was told in a meeting that, “we need a female director because we need someone who is mostly concerned with the development of Scarlett Johansson’s character.”
Martel was also told, “Don’t worry about the action scenes, we’ll take care of that.”
At first, Martel attempted to push back on this, insisting that she’d “love” to handle the action sequences herself.
“The first thing I asked them was maybe if they could change the special effects because there’s so many laser lights,” Martel later told IndieWire. “I find them horrible. Also the soundtrack of Marvel films is quite horrendous. Maybe we disagree on this but it’s really hard to watch a Marvel film. It’s painful to the ears to watch Marvel films.”
Martel ultimately turned the gig down, and Black Widow instead went to Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland.
Brave New Approach
With Captain America: Brave New World in cinemas, Marvel will end its phase five with its Suicide Squad-esque Thunderbolts*, out in May. Then the MCU juggernaut will roll straight into phase six with The Fantastic Four: First Steps this July. Those films may yet prove that the studio can still tell coherent, crowd-pleasing stories within the maximalist, expensive template that it has established for itself.
It’s arguable, however, that Marvel could take more inspiration from Roger Corman’s way of making movies. Not just in terms of keeping its budgets low, but also in the way Corman recognised and (to an extent) nurtured new talent. Some of Corman’s brightest young filmmakers went on to have long careers; within three years of producing the low-budget effects for Galaxy Of Terror, James Cameron was directing his first hit, The Terminator (1984).
Corman’s filmmakers may have been poorly paid, but they were at least given a springboard for future success; as Corman once joked to Ron Howard, “If you do a good job for me on this picture, you’ll never have to work for me again.”
Marvel’s directors and writers, on the other hand, are cogs in an increasingly complex and unwieldy machine. A machine dedicated to turning out ever more outlandish spectacle rather than character-led story, and one dominated by previs rather than storytelling.
Corman himself had opinions about Marvel’s output, so perhaps it’s only right that we end this piece with a quote from him.
“I do think, actually, that they are extremely well made, and the special effects are just phenomenal,” Corman told Paste magazine in 2022. “But if I have any quibble with them, it’s that…Jim Cameron, who started with me, when you see a big-budget effects film from Jim, you always recognise that the story comes first, and the special effects are only there to help the story.
“Whereas with Marvel, it sometimes feels like the special effects are the stars, and the story frankly can be filler between the special effects.”
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