The Cinematic Universe Is Officially Over

I want to write this while the evidence is fresh enough to be relevant and old enough to be conclusive. The shared cinematic universe, as a dominant commercial format for American studio filmmaking, is over. The decade from roughly 2012 to 2022 was its functional life. The decade from roughly 2022 forward is the contraction. We are now in the post-mortem phase.

This is a significant industrial shift, and it is worth naming clearly. The shared cinematic universe did not fail in the way most commercial film formats fail, through a single catastrophic flop or a generational-taste inversion. It failed through a specific pattern of diminishing returns that became, incrementally, impossible to reverse. The diagnostic is instructive.

What the format was

A shared cinematic universe, in the strict sense, is a sequence of films (and, increasingly, television series) that take place in a single continuous narrative world, with character and plot threads that cross between productions. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, launched with Iron Man in 2008 and reaching a commercial peak with Avengers: Endgame in 2019, was the functional template. Warner’s DC Extended Universe (now rebooted as the DCU under James Gunn), Universal’s aborted Dark Universe, the Wizarding World (starting from Fantastic Beasts), and various failed attempts (MonsterVerse, the Sony Spider-Man-Verse) were the variants.

The economic logic was specific and appealing: audiences who invested in one film would be motivated to see subsequent films in the same world. Marketing costs per film could be amortised across the franchise. Character recognition compounded. Box-office performance became additive across the slate rather than dependent on individual films.

For about a decade, this logic worked. The MCU hit its stride with The Avengers (2012), sustained through Phases Two and Three, and reached its commercial apex with the Infinity War and Endgame pair (2018 and 2019). Endgame grossed $2.8 billion worldwide on a $356 million budget, and the format looked, briefly, permanent.

What broke

Several things broke, and the interactions among them are the actual story.

Continuity saturation. By 2020, keeping up with the MCU required watching specific Disney+ television series in addition to the theatrical films. WandaVision, Loki, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, Hawkeye, She-Hulk, and others introduced characters and plot threads that were referenced in subsequent theatrical releases. Audience attention, which had been broadly willing to track cross-film continuity at the two-film-per-year cadence of early Phase Three, could not keep up with the five-to-eight-production-per-year cadence of Phase Four.

Character diffusion. The original MCU anchor characters (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Hulk) exited the franchise across Endgame and subsequent films. The replacement characters did not, broadly, establish equivalent commercial weight. Audiences who had been trained to show up for specific established characters had less reason to show up for their replacements.

Multiverse fatigue. The MCU’s Phase Four and Five have organised themselves around a “multiverse” concept that introduces alternate-reality variants of established characters, parallel timelines, and specific structural complications that the audience has not, broadly, wanted to track. The multiverse concept was a solution to a specific narrative problem (how to extend the franchise beyond its original character roster) that created worse problems than it solved.

Quality variance. Across Phase Four and Five, the MCU’s quality has been uneven in a way the earlier phases mostly were not. Eternals (2021), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), The Marvels (2023) all underperformed both critically and commercially. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) were stronger but still below Phase Three’s standard. Audiences learned that the MCU brand no longer reliably delivered the quality they had previously trusted it for.

Disney+ cannibalisation. The original MCU’s theatrical-only distribution created urgency: see it now, in a theatre, or fall behind the conversation. With Disney+ offering the television extensions and, within thirty to sixty days, the theatrical films themselves, audiences had no structural reason to see Marvel films in theatres. They watched them at home. Theatrical revenues contracted. The additive-box-office logic stopped functioning.

The DCU problem

Warner’s DC Extended Universe followed a slightly different failure trajectory but arrived at the same endpoint. The DCEU never achieved the MCU’s unified creative vision; it was, across its decade, a patchwork of specifically-auteur-driven films (Snyder’s three Superman/Batman films, Jenkins’ Wonder Woman, Reeves’ The Batman) that did not share tone or continuity. By 2022, Warner had abandoned the continuity and effectively rebooted under James Gunn as the new DCU.

Gunn’s reboot, which formally launched with Superman (2025), is an explicit attempt to restart the cinematic universe format at a moment when the format is broadly in decline. I respect Gunn’s ambition. I do not think the format supports the ambition anymore.

What is replacing the format

Several things are replacing the shared cinematic universe, none of them a direct equivalent.

The director-driven studio event film. Sinners (2025), The Brutalist (2024), Oppenheimer (2023), and other similar releases have demonstrated that audiences will show up for major theatrical events anchored to a specific director’s name rather than to a franchise. This is more like the pre-2008 studio model, and it appears to be commercially viable again.

The self-contained sequel franchise. Films like Mission: Impossible, Fast and Furious, and the John Wick extensions continue to function as serial franchises without requiring shared-universe mechanics. Each film is a sequel to the previous one; audiences do not need to have watched auxiliary television series or adjacent films. The format is older and simpler, and it works.

The television-as-primary-format approach. For certain kinds of genre material, prestige television has replaced the cinematic universe as the dominant format. The Penguin, Fallout, The Last of Us, and similar shows deliver the world-building and character-investment that shared cinematic universes were attempting, at a budget scale that theatrical exhibition can no longer support.

What ends

The shared cinematic universe, as the centre of American studio filmmaking, is ending. There will continue to be Marvel films. There will continue to be DC films. They will continue to gross meaningful money. But they will not, I think, return to the commercial centre of gravity they occupied from 2012 to 2019.

This is, on balance, good news for American cinema. The shared cinematic universe, at its peak, was a specifically narrowing form. It required specific kinds of films to be made, at specific scales, with specific narrative constraints. Its decline opens space for other kinds of films to return to the studio slates.

I am not claiming the replacement format will be obviously superior. I am claiming only that the decade of shared-universe dominance is over, that the industrial ecosystem is reconfiguring, and that the films that emerge from the reconfiguration will be, in aggregate, more diverse in form than the ones that emerged from the previous decade.

Watch for the signs. Marvel will announce a specific strategic pivot within the next two years. Disney+’s MCU television output will contract. The theatrical slate will become more selective. By 2027 or so, the format will be functionally dead as a dominant form, surviving only in specific legacy productions and occasional revivals.

The post-mortem has been written. The autopsy will be completed in real time.