As of this writing, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike has reached day 102, and there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight. Likewise, Zeb Wells’s current run on Amazing Spider-Man has reached day 471 with no end in sight.
At first glance, you might think these two activities have nothing in common, but both share an underlying problem that directly contributes to their respective circumstances.
In other words, they’re both in bad shape within the Court of Public Opinion for the same reason. Hollywood writers and Marvel Comics have both forgotten why they exist.
Americans Don’t Care About Hollywood
A recent L.A. Times article made the rounds recently because it highlighted a poll showing where the average American stood on the WGA strike. The poll isn’t in question, but you have to look at the numbers to draw a reasonable conclusion instead of going with the Times article’s interpretation of the results.
Just over a third of people polled said they sympathized with the goals of the WGA, which should be an encouragement for the strikers. However, the bigger deal lies in what wasn’t highlighted. More than half of the pollers weren’t interested in the particulars of the strike or didn’t have an opinion either way if they were.
I’ll say that again for the folks in the back. More than half of the people surveyed didn’t know about or didn’t care about the strike.
If you go through the list of WGA demands (or you can read the handy cheatsheet from a prior newsletter right here), some demands are reasonable, but others are not. Most of the demands, whether reasonable or not, have a heavy focus on more money and more job protection, particularly in the face of disruptive technologies (A.I.) and an unstable economy.
Everybody wants better work stability, whether fairly requested or not, but the real story lies in what you don’t see. How are the writers performing, how are the writers improving, and how is the content the writers produce making more money for the studios? The harder you search, the sooner you realize that “quality” and “writing entertainment the public is willing to pay for” never come up as a guiding metric.
Somewhere along the way, Hollywood (as an entity) has forgotten its one purpose in life – to create profitable entertainment.
That’s it. Above all else, Hollywood’s reason for existence is to create magic, entertainment, and fun for average people to get away from average lives for an hour or two.
Therefore, when the public is largely turned off by endless reboots and reimaginings of stories we already know, propaganda pieces that lecture and condescend to the public on one or more socio-political issues, and reimagined versions of popular IPs because one or more elements are considered “problematic,” you wind up with an industry that’s turned from entertainment magic machine into a High School Civics class.
Hollywood forgot how to be fun, and the American public doesn’t want to hang out with it anymore. Looking at the streak of box office flops, it appears Americans are not interested in paying for films that aren’t fun, so the WGA is partly losing in the Court of Public Opinion because the modern Hollywood writer either can’t or won’t focus on entertainment first.
Amazing Spider-Man aka Giving Fans The Opposite Of What They Want
I was there at the start of Zeb Wells’s run on Amazing Spider-Man (ASM), and it’s fair to say Wells started strong with an excellent take on Tombstone. Wells made the stone-skinned gangster a formidable threat to Spider-Man as a villain with a winning mix of cleverness and muscle.
But underneath the strong start festered a sense of unease. The big bang surprises in issue #1 kicked off the “What did Peter do?” arc, which I’ve discussed multiple times in these articles. The arc culminated around issue #25 in a lackluster villain (Rabin) reveal, the introduction of a reviled side character (Paul), and a lazily constructed death for Ms. Marvel. The only thing Amazing about Wells’s ASM is how badly Wells and editor Nick Lowe botched a year’s worth of issues.
If you’ve lived and breathed comics as much as we have, it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience, to figure out what ASM fans want.
- They want the fairly-maligned One More Day story outcome reversed by getting Peter and MJ back together
- They want Peter to mature and come into his own as an older, wiser hero, possibly with a family
- They want Spider-Man to move on with new adventures instead of retreading the same stories over and over.
A paying audience has expectations. That doesn’t mean you give them what they want, word-for-word. That does mean you satisfy their need to be entertained by meeting or ideally exceeding their expectations with fun and variety.
Instead, what has Marvel done?
- Marvel forcefully arranges a situation where MJ gets into a committed relationship with a new character named Paul. The situation is constructed in such a way that getting Peter and MJ back together can’t happen without an ugly breakup that makes everyone look terrible.
- Marvel continually portrays Peter as an irresponsible, absent-minded hero who allows his hero duties to constantly undermine his relationships with friends, family, and fellow heroes. A work-life balance is a challenge for everyone, but Peter’s genius-level smarts should have allowed him to figure out some kind of system by now.
- And yes, as of this writing, Marvel has announced a sequel/do-over to Spider-Man: Reign, which follows the Miles Morales version of the Clone Saga, which follows the Dark Web event which was a cheap knockoff of the X-Men: Inferno crossover event. You can’t swing a Flerken these days without hitting another tired retread and threepeat announcement from Marvel that reads like the same story re-done multiple times, and better, from decades past.
Nobody in the Spider-office wants to take a chance on entertaining the audience by giving them what they want. Chalk it up to bad advice, ignorance, arrogance, or stubbornness, but the net result is a comics publisher who forgot that entertaining the audience is the reason why it exists.
Consequently, ASM (as well as general Marvel title) sales are considerably down compared to decades past. To be clear, there are multiple reasons for a downward sales trend, but irritating your main fanbase is a major contributor. Why would fans get excited to buy a comic when they know they won’t get what they want, won’t be satisfied, and hear from multiple players at Marvel that giving fans what they want is “wrong” or that fans “don’t really know what they want.”
Just like Hollywood, Marvel has one reason for existence above all others – to create profitable entertainment. That’s it. If Marvel isn’t creating ASM comics that make readers happy and entertains audiences enough to keep them coming back for more, then something is clearly wrong with their approach.
A Horse Of Another Color Is Still A Horse
There you have it. Two completely different situations rooted in the exact same problem
An entertainment company’s primary purpose is to create entertainment people like enough to pay for.
Hollywood forgot that lesson by churning out one bomb after another, and yet, the same writers who helped create an endless cycle of junk now call on the average American’s support in their bid for more money… at the worst possible time. Unsurprisingly, the majority of Americans polled don’t care.
Marvel’s Spider-office forgot that lesson by twisting, retreading, and manipulating nearly everything about the Amazing Spider-Man to ensure readers don’t get what they want and will never be satisfied, much less entertained. Now, Marvel is faced with dwindling sales numbers, hiring freezes, and the possibility of a line-wide reboot (just a rumor… for now) to clear out the mess. Unsurprisingly, the readers’ reactions increasingly range from ire to ambivalence.
Where do the WGA and Marvel go from here? The future is uncertain, but it’s clear no major changes will happen until leadership and policies change. When a team is failing, it’s time for a new coach with a new playbook. The only questions remaining are “Who is the right person to become that new leader?” and “How soon will they get here?”
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