Popverse's top stories

• Avengers: Doomsday is already ignoring one of the biggest lessons of the success of James Gunn’s Superman
• What to Watch This Weekend: All the Alien movies before Alien: Earth next week
• Luigi Mangione is "a story about the American Dream Gone Wrong," says James Patterson, and he's writing a book to prove it

When is it too much of a good thing? In the case of the MCU, some point after Avengers: Endgame. The biggest critique of the ever-expanding media franchise became how fans felt like they had to watch all the movies and TV series to have any hope of keeping up with what was happening on the screen. Turns out, even Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, thinks the studio went overboard pumping out content in the years after Endgame, which caused a serious dip in quality.

During a long interview with the press timed with the release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Kevin Feige, who has been the architect behind the MCU since its inception, admitted that they’d put out too much, too quickly. “We produced 50 hours of stories between 2007 and 2019,” he explained. That period takes the MCU from Robert Downey Jr.’s first appearance as Iron Man up through Avengers: Endgame and the end of the Infinity Saga. However, in the six years since, they’ve “had well over 100 hours of stories – in half the time. That’s too much.”

Why did the studio produce so many movies and series? Part of it was because they wanted to take their success and experiment with it by making different kinds of movies like Eternals. However, part of it was also trying to expand into their new streaming space. “What we also ended up focusing on because of Disney+ was expansion – and it’s that expansion that I think led people to say, ‘It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?’”

That need to expand also caused a lack of quality control at Marvel Studios. “For the first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” Feige said. “We spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga saying that’s never going to happen to us. We always had more characters than we could possibly make because we weren’t going to make a movie a month. Suddenly, there’s a mandate to make more. And we go, ‘Well, we have to do more.’”

That mandate likely came from Disney, which had spent a lot of money setting up Disney+ as a streaming service and was keen to populate it with exclusives from its Marvel brand to entice subscribers. However, in hindsight, it seems that did more harm than good to the company. Now, the focus is, once again, on quality, even if it means Marvel makes fewer shows in the future.

Consider this a meta post-credits scene for Marvel fans - the four key articles you need to read next to continue the thrills:

• How to watch the Marvel Cinematic Universe in release or chronological order
• The best Marvel Comics stories of all time
• All the MCU movies ranked from best to worst
• Our weekly Marvel insider's column, Marvel Matters