The Marvel Cinematic Universe — that wacky world of interconnected superhero movies — is the highest-grossing film franchise in history. To date, it’s earned over $31 billion at the box office.
And Sony could’ve bought it all for $15 million in 1998.
Sony rebuffed Marvel’s offer: All it wanted was the film rights to Spider-Man, which it bought for either $10 million or $7 million. (Different sources give different figures.)
Yair Landau, then a junior-level Sony executive, recalled the fateful decision:
The collective [Sony] team decided they didn't care about the other Marvel properties, that they didn't want to invest in them. I was told, “Nobody gives a s**t about anybody but Spider-Man.”
One day, someone will write a book about the meteoric rise — and just-as-spectacular fall — of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Because today, the MCU is a half-dead dinosaur.
2025 marked the end of its decade-plus streak of box office dominance.
A hallmark of the MCU's continued success can be found in its 13-year streak of having at least one movie finish in the worldwide top 10 box office. From 2012 to 2024, every year had an MCU movie finish in that tier, other than 2020, when Marvel Studios didn't release a single movie due to COVID.
[…]
This will make 2025 the first time since 2011 when the MCU didn't have a movie finish in the top 10. Back then, Thor could only get to 15th, and Captain America: The First Avenger ended at 18th. Considering Iron Man and Iron Man 2 finished in the top 10 for 2008 and 2010, respectively, 2025 will be only the second time the MCU has failed to secure this honor in a year when they released a movie.
Theories abound for the MCU’s dramatic loss of popularity. Some blame “superhero fatigue.” Others point fingers at streaming and overexposure. There’s also the go-woke-go-broke argument.
All of the above contributed, but I think the biggest factor was the loss of trust. Throughout the 2010s, every single MCU film was a must-see movie because the events in one MCU movie set the stakes for the next one. Audiences didn’t want to miss out on the fun because we trusted the MCU’s storytelling.
I might not know what the heck a Groot is, but I’ll watch Guardians of the Galaxy anyway, ‘cause this is gonna lead to somewhere good!
It seemed like Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and the MCU braintrust had meticulously mapped out all the intricate details. Diehard fans would devour every rumor and pore over the minutia, trying to figure out where this sprawling, interconnected soap opera-in-tights was gonna go next. Every plotline — and all the characters — seemed to serve a very specific purpose.
It was Chekhov’s Gun writ large.
But over the past few years, it’s turned into Chekhov’s Lost and Found: From an (aborted) multiverse storyline about a supervillain named Kang to the Earth becoming an egg and giving birth to a giant alien, important characters were introduced — and then vanished. Key plotlines were inexplicably abandoned. One moment, the Hulk has a fully-grown son (with a horrible haircut); the next, his son is forgotten.
Little by little, it dawned on the audience: Hey, wait a minute! This isn’t impeccably-outlined, cleverly-written, long-form storytelling! Instead, the MCU is randomly throwing [feces] at the wall, hoping something will stick!
Which meant audiences didn’t have to watch every film.
The MCU is trying to rebound. It rolled a Brink’s truck to Robert Downey Jr. earlier in the year, paying him $100 million to return to the MCU as the diabolical Doctor Doom. But it’ll have to change its marketing strategy, because it squandered its goodwill. Instead of relying on the strength of the MCU brand, it must now “sell” the quality of each individual film.
And this brings us to MAGA, the U.S. economy, and the latest polling data. Over the past few days, new numbers came out — and they’re absolutely horrific.
From Fox News: “Fox News Poll: Voters say White House is doing more harm than good on economy”:
Some 76% of voters view the economy negatively. That’s worse than the 67% who felt that way in July and the 70% who said the same at the end of former President Biden’s term.
Large numbers, overall and among Republicans, say their costs for groceries, utilities, healthcare and housing have gone up this year.
Voters blame the president. About twice as many say President Donald Trump, rather than Biden, is responsible for the current economy. And three times as many say Trump’s economic policies have hurt them (they said the same about Biden’s last year). Plus, approval of how Trump is handling the economy hit a new low, and disapproval of his overall job performance hit record highs among core supporters.
[…]
Trump’s job performance drew career-high disapproval among men, White voters and those without a college degree.
Eighty-six percent of Republicans approve, down from 92% in March.
Among all voters, 41% approve of the job Trump is doing, while 58% disapprove. Only once have his ratings been lower and that was during his first term, 38-57% in October 2017. Two months ago, it was 46-54%.
For comparison, Biden’s marks were a bit better at the same point in his presidency: 44% approved and 54% disapproved in November 2021.
It eerily echoes the results of a recent NBC News poll:
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of registered voters, including 30% of Republicans, said in the recent national NBC News poll that Trump has fallen short of their expectations on the cost of living and the economy. After being one of the big reasons why Trump won a return to the White House in 2024, Trump’s performance on the economy has become one of the big drags on his second term.
While a number of Trump voters told NBC News in January that they’d give Trump a relatively long leash to improve the economy, the new interviews suggest that for some he’s running out of slack.
It’s not fair, of course. James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote a remarkable analysis of President Biden’s economic record for The New Criterion.
The Biden administration, enabled by Democratic majorities in Congress, created the [affordability] crisis through reckless spending, costly regulations, and an open southern border. The facts speak for themselves with respect to prices and inflation, interest rates, mortgage rates, and the costs of housing, food, and electricity.
When President Trump left office at the beginning of 2021, the annual inflation rate was 1.2 percent. Over the course of his first term in office, inflation increased by a total of about 7 percent, or at a rate of 1.75 percent per year, well below the Federal Reserve’s inflation targets.
President Biden, with the support of his party in Congress, went on a spending spree when he took office, adding nearly four trillion in new spending in 2021 and 2022 through the American Rescue Plan ($1.9 trillion), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($1.2 trillion), and the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act ($891 billion). These were mostly payoffs to unions, green-energy schemes, and identity groups that supported the Democrats in the 2020 elections. The three measures increased the federal debt to well over $33 trillion and caused prices to rise almost immediately.
A graph by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis showing changes in the Consumer Price Index illustrates how inflation grew rapidly in Biden’s early years in office, increasing from an annual rate of just over 1 percent when President Trump left office to more than 9 percent in mid-2022. All told, inflation increased by about 20 percent over his four years in office, leading to higher prices for all consumer items and escalating interest rates. Prices have stabilized in the past year during President Trump’s second term.
But the Biden economic record is increasingly irrelevant. The Democrats have effectively memory-holed the malaise, dysfunction, inflation, and ineptitude of the Biden years. From the perspective of the average American, Donald Trump looked us in the eye and promised he’d make everything better — and so far, he hasn’t.
During the 1992 presidential election, James Carville popularized the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
And it usually is.
More often than not, Americans vote with their wallets. Issues like illegal immigration, abortion, global warming, Gaza, and LGBTQ rights are all fine and good, but the candidate who wins on Election Day is almost always the one who convinces the voters that they’ll be wealthier, richer, and more successful with him/her in charge.
President Trump’s current economic messaging parallels the MCU’s during its heyday: He just keeps on insisting that everything is wonderful, and expecting the goodwill he’s stockpiled to satiate the masses ‘til the pain goes away.
From Fox Business: “Trump says US in a ‘golden age’ as ‘prices are coming down’”
President Donald Trump said on Monday that the U.S. is in an era of economic prosperity as "prices are coming down."
"This is also the golden age of America because we are doing better than we've ever done as a country," Trump said while addressing affordability in front of key political figures and McDonald's franchisees and executives in Washington at the McDonald's Impact Summit. "Prices are coming down and all of that stuff."
Trump told audience members that inflation is "normal" after dropping from its highest level in more than 40 years.
That strategy won’t work. The goodwill is gone: The public blames Trump’s tariff policies for today’s affordability crisis, not the Biden administration.
Instead of insisting that the economy is great, President Trump needs to demonstrate it with a data-driven dashboard.
It’s a classic example of “Show, don’t tell.” As the aforementioned Anton Checkhov preached, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
We’ve gotta take the American people by the hand, arm ‘em with the facts, and let ‘em arrive at a pro-MAGA destination on their own.
In other words, they need to connect the dots for themselves.
The American people wanna see the “connective tissue” that proves these tariffs are worth it. They don’t understand the economic argument for tariffs, and they don’t believe everything is wonderful, because basic goods still cost too much.
That means that the White House must invest in new ways to track the tariffs:
- Where’s the list of all the new, better-paying jobs? How many are there — and which states are they in? Let’s hear the story!
- What are the latest stats on domestic investments? We hear talk about countries like Saudi Arabia investing “trillions,” so we need a better methodology to tally the numbers — and celebrate these big victories.
- Pick five relatable indicators of inflation. Doesn’t matter what five you pick, as long as it makes sense to the average household. (It could be the price of eggs, a gallon of gas, the cost of milk — whatever.) But we need to “package” these stats in a comprehensive way, to remind the American people how bad things were under Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, and how much progress we’ve already made under President Trump.
The mainstream media won’t tell our story for us. We need to do it ourselves.
Related: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Affordability, and Epstein (Oh My!): How Trump Battles Back
But we'd better move quickly. The 2026 midterms are less than a year away.
‘Cause otherwise, MAGA will suffer the same fate of the MCU — only this time, the bad guys will win.
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