Setting aside the woke factor, the root cause of franchise decline is likely the creative material available to a given IP. Once a rich stock of preexisting material has run its course, screenwriters have nothing to adapt and it's difficult to impossible for them to generate equally potent ideas. We saw this with Game of Thrones seasons 6-7 when Dumb and Dumber ran out of book material.
With comics, people will say that there's a half century's worth of material. Sure, but movies aren't like comic books. You can't just write disconnected sagas as if the MCU is a soap opera, you need a connected timeline, and that timeline needs to have its own story structure of setup, theme, and so on. Not impossible, but it requires a lot of expertise and a lot of creative risks. Kevin Feige's team of screenwriters that churned out 40 formula movies is simply not capable of that even before the diversity hires.
The multiverse concept has been used as a band-aid over this problem, and although it's good for cash grabs like No Way Home, it's not working.
Setting aside the woke factor, the root cause of franchise decline is likely the creative material available to a given IP. Once a rich stock of preexisting material has run its course, screenwriters have nothing to adapt and it's difficult to impossible for them to generate equally potent ideas. We saw this with Game of Thrones seasons 6-7 when Dumb and Dumber ran out of book material.
With comics, people will say that there's a half century's worth of material. Sure, but movies aren't like comic books. You can't just write disconnected sagas as if the MCU is a soap opera, you need a connected timeline, and that timeline needs to have its own story structure of setup, theme, and so on. Not impossible, but it requires a lot of expertise and a lot of creative risks. Kevin Feige's team of screenwriters that churned out 40 formula movies is simply not capable of that even before the diversity hires.
The multiverse concept has been used as a band-aid over this problem, and although it's good for cash grabs like No Way Home, it's not working.