Avengers director is right about superhero fatigue but wrong about younger viewers

Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo is making headlines today following a GamesRadar+ interview, but the reaction is probably the one he wanted. 

The GamesRadar+ interview comes after a year that saw Marvel Studios struggle with two thunderous flops – Ant-Man & the Wasp in Quantumania and The Marvels. Coupled with the DCEU’s miserable box office, many called it the end of the superhero boom, citing that all-too-familiar term, “superhero fatigue.”

But Russo called the current woes of the MCU more of a generational issue than anything else. He flat-out dismisses that the boogeyman of superhero fatigue even exists. Instead, he put the onus of the problem on the younger generation that isn’t going to the movies as much. 

“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 aging out,” Russo said. Meanwhile, the new generation is ‘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.”

Are younger viewers avoiding cinema because their attention spans are shot?

The interview has received considerable attention, especially after Variety shared the interview on its social media feed. Comments have been flowing in nonstop, with many criticizing Russo’s argument about fatigue and the “new generation” as misrepresentative. They say the issue is with the quality of movies, not the quality of the viewer. 

Russo’s statement echoes the exhausting comments we’ve seen for years targeting the younger generation of moviegoers. As usual, such talking points use the boom of superhero films as a handwaved excuse for the low profits and poor reception of more traditionally released cinema. 

“We have never collectively, globally, processed our conversation so intimately and quickly as we do now,” Russo explained. “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. 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.”

It’s a tough pill to swallow from Russo, who was behind the second-biggest movie of all time when it was released just five years ago, after supposed attention-span killers like Twitter and TikTok were already well-engrained in the culture. Pretending as if the issue has solely been a change in how a younger generation consumes media feels disingenuous, at best. 

Younger viewers value their time more because the media landscape has changed

The fact of the matter is that the media landscape is always changing, and media always finds a way to adapt. 30 years ago, I watched basic cable and read the Sunday funnies. Today, I have a basic streaming app with my Internet package and am occasionally reminded how much I love Calvin & Hobbes when an old strip comes across my Reddit feed. 

But in place of my parents’ old basic cable package and a stack of inky newsprint are new ways to consume more media than ever. I begrudgingly pay for too many streaming services, like we all do. Meanwhile, services like Comixology send all the Garfield I could possibly want to my phone, where my fingers no longer get covered in ink. 

The theater-going experience is also miserable and has been for a long, long time. I grew up watching movies at the $2 theater on base, and the experience of going to a cinema remains incredibly nostalgic for me. But the price keeps going up, and what I’m being offered keeps going down. You can blame some of this on the pandemic, but the theater model was in sore need of an overhaul long before 2020. 

I love Ghostbusters. I grew up on the movies and cartoon, I had all the toys, and I ran around the house wearing a proton pack. But if Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is getting mediocre reviews, does my love for the franchise require me to spend $40 to get an Ecto-1 popcorn bucket and sit in a not-terribly-clean recliner in a theater for two hours? Is my time not better spent at home, where I already have snacks and a relatively clean couch from which I can watch it when it hits streaming? Or choose to instead watch eight hours of Fallout or a brand-new, studio-quality horror flick like Late Night with the Devil?

On the flip side is the kind of on-demand, cultural milestone viewing we so rarely get now. The Barbenheimer double bill was a once-in-a-lifetime event, a serendipitous moment when two films—one a millennial’s technicolor dream and the other a meticulously thoughtful, more traditional film—ignited the box office.

Sure, marketing played a role in that, but people kept going because the movies were good, and their friends went because people they trusted told them the movies were good, and so on and so forth. Fans are still going to cinemas; they’re just not coming out for projects that refuse to respect their time.

Superhero movies aren’t Westerns, but they will share their fate

Perhaps it is Russo’s final comments in the interview that give me the most hope that the media experience will correct itself. He calls back to a tired comparison of superhero films to classic westerns, saying, “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.”

And he’s right about that. While many point to the era after the Western boon as a renaissance of films, what everyone forgets to mention is that those Westerns never really went away. Modern Westerns like Unforgiven, True Grit, and Django Unchained surprised audiences, earning acclaim from critics and fans despite being part of a supposedly “dead” genre. 

In much the same way, I suspect superhero movies aren’t going away, no matter how the theater experience is mangled or what degree of superhero fatigue is perceived. As always, the landscape will simply evolve.

Big studio films like the MCU will eventually have to embrace the changing theater experience to focus on quality and crafted stories over a shotgun attempt at releasing as much content as possible—a bitter pill Marvel has acknowledged, though it remains to be seen if executives will course correct. If they don’t, someone else will just come along and take that box office money for themselves. 

The next tentpole superhero film, Deadpool & Wolverine, is in theaters on July 26. Joe and Anthony Russo’s next film, The Electric State, hits Netflix sometime this year.