Andor creator Tony Gilroy recently shared his thoughts on why he believes the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in decline.
Speaking to Slashfilm, Gilroy first detailed why he decided to eschew the initial buddy cop pitch for the show, “In the show, it's perfect. [K-2SO's late introduction was] something I always intended. The versions that they had of the show prior, they were slick and they were interesting. They were not bad, but they had a fatal flaw, it seemed to me, which is if that's your show, that we're going to storm the Citadel in the pilot, what are you going to do in episode 9? What do you do? You're just going to keep getting the disc?”
He then applied this thinking to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Trying to get the, what do they call it? I can't remember the name of the box. What the f*** is the name of the box in 'The Avengers'? What the f*** are they going for? [...] The Tesseract! That's why all those Marvel movies are all — that's why they fail. You're just constantly … if that's all you're doing, then all you're doing is just trying to get the Tesseract."
The idea that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is failing because it uses MacGuffins is completely absurd on its face given MacGuffins have been used in films since they first started making them and some of the most popular, well-loved, and well-crafted films have MacGuffins.
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However, if Gilroy is not just talking about MacGuffins, but pointing to the idea that the formulaic nature of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become stale, there is definitely some truth to that.
Novelist J.D. Cowan notes this formulaic creation of stories is a corruption of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey that was popularized by screenwriter Christopher Vogler in in The Writer’s Journey book. Cowan explains, “What the Hero's Journey was started as Joseph Campbell's attempt to find underlying patterns in all stories that form an overarching myth for all of humanity. What did stories have in common and what could be shared between them in a large overarching monomyth? He did not cobble a one size fits all formula to write stories, in fact not every story has the same mechanism or tropes, but each has at least some aspect that resonates with others. They all, in the end, point to the same Truth overall. What he was doing was seeing that no matter how different a story was they all played into the overarching monomyth of the human race, but in different ways and with different approaches.”
In contrast, he shares that in The Writer’s Journey book, Vogler took “Campbell's work then buil[t] his own formula around it by bending and warping the original purpose into a one-size fits all screenwriting guide. He hammered it in awkwardly to get the result he wanted out of it.”
Furthermore, Reg Harris at Your Heroic Journey details that Vogler created his formula while working at The Walt Disney Company, “Vogler condensed Campbell’s complex model into 12-stages to create a practical guide for using the hero’s journey to evaluate and edit scripts submitted to Disney. He distributed his memo to Disney executives. Interest grew and the memo became, as Vogler describes it, ‘the ‘I have to have it’ document of the season.’”
He goes on to note, “Instead of being a guide to evaluate and correct stories, The Writer’s Journey has became the formula for writing the stories. Many writers and producers, looking for a quick, salable story, have abused the hero’s journey by using it as a standardized story formula."
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And as Cowan notes, “there is not one correct way to write a hero or a hero story. This was the whole point of Campbell's original theory to begin with. All stories shade in different aspects of the overarching Monomyth in various ways.”
To that point in order to escape the monotonous formula of modern Hollywood storytelling, Cowan suggests, “Genre expectations, what makes a hero, morality, purpose, and the meaning of good and evil, have all been bungled by the big dogs in charge and were done so long ago. If we want to move past them we're going to have to go even further back while simultaneously pulling even further ahead into uncharted waters.”
What do you make of Gilroy’s comments and his thoughts on why Marvel is failing?
His boring show also failed.
Makes me consider watching Andor. He seems to have an understanding far deeper than the typical “cargo cult” Hollywood type.