James Gunn took over DC’s films in 2022, the same year that Marvel released Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder, which scored a 73% and a 63% from audiences respectively on Rotten Tomatoes. For reference, a good score on Rotten Tomatoes is usually 75% or higher.
For a long time, Marvel has been the only company feasibly competing for the superhero market in film. After all, only two out of the films in the DC Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman and The Suicide Squad, scored above an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, while Marvel enjoyed consistent scores in the mid to high 80s during its peak between 2013 and 2019.
But after Avengers: Endgame, widely considered to be one of Marvel’s best films and also the film that served as a definitive conclusion for everything in the Marvel universe up to that point, this monopoly started to show itself. For a few years after Endgame, The movies, aside from a few notable standouts, generally felt lackluster and underbaked, even as viewership declined. But the quality of Marvel’s work reached a turning point in 2022, when even its generally critically acclaimed shows had stopped being as good. By this point, audiences had gotten tired of the gimmick of the superhero film and its deeply interconnected web of continuity between each film, often described by the newly coined phrase “Marvel bloat”.
So when James Gunn, generally considered one of the best superhero directors of all time for his work on the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, announced in 2022 that he would be leaving Marvel for DC, many fans rejoiced at the notion that Marvel might finally have some competition.
This may seem like horrible news for Marvel, and in some ways it is. But, as has been seen time and again, competition breeds innovation. When two companies are fighting for a market, they both have to one up each other to draw in customers, which means that customers get better content from both.
A recent example of this can be seen in video games. For a long time, Overwatch was by far the best performing hero shooter, even as the developers refused to listen to community feedback on balance and didn’t implement features that the playerbase requested for years. But in late 2024, Marvel Rivals released and dwarfed Overwatch by drawing crowds of gamers looking for something other than the stale, broken game that Overwatch had become. In fact, Rivals hit a peak of 400,000 concurrent players at the same time that Overwatch had only 27,000.
This incredible drop in playerbase scared the Overwatch developers enough to implement those features that had been missing for years, as well as make balance improvements over the past few months. And now, the two games are relatively even in terms of playerbase and Overwatch is in its best state in years.
And this same principle will hold true for Marvel as well. This year has seen Marvel begin a return to form, with movies like Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps scoring in the high 80s. These movies are almost certainly a reaction to renewed competition with DC, given that the average production cycle for a film lasts two to three years.
While DC’s new stake in the market for superhero movies might seem to signal Marvel’s demise, it will only make them fight harder for viewership and return to making solid films again.