In an age of superhero fatigue, Marvel’s best shot is to think small, and outside the box

Blink a little and you might think we are back in 2019. The latest Spider-Man film, Brand New Day, has just passed $2.4bn at the global box office, to become the third-highest grossing film of all time behind Avatar and Avengers: Endgame. Meanwhile Avengers: Doomsday is reported to have already earned more than $50m in US ticket presales alone, despite the fact that it doesn’t come out until December. Clearly we are in the middle of a superhero renaissance.

And yet it doesn’t really feel like it, largely because it is something of a turnaround for Marvel, after a pretty disappointing 2025 in which all three of the studio’s releases underperformed. Captain America: Brave New World took $415m worldwide, Thunderbolts* managed $382m and even the well-reviewed The Fantastic Four: First Steps stalled at $521m, against a reported $200m budget. These are hardly Madame Web numbers but they do suggest there is still a problem about what to do with all those superheroes who cannot sustain a $300m multiversal extravaganza.

Enter Sebastian Stan, AKA Marvel’s Winter Soldier, who this week suggested the solution might be to place them in cheaper genre films instead. Speaking to New York Magazine, the actor revealed that he had pitched Marvel boss Kevin Feige a new, “Sicario-esque”” approach for Bucky Barnes’ next adventure. “We keep a real small budget,” he said. “It’s about a guy who thinks he recog­nises someone from his past that had something to do with when, you know, he was brain­washed, and he gets obsessed with this per­son. He goes on a whole jour­ney to try to fig­ure out who this per­son is. It’s a thriller.”

In any other period, this might feel like just another example of an actor trying to do his producer’s job for him. But Stan is on something of a career high, having earned his first Oscar nomination for The Apprentice and won a Golden Globe for A Different Man. And the idea of dropping the Winter Soldier into a murky, Sicario-style conspiracy thriller almost feels custom-designed to offset superhero fatigue. Stan was perfectly fine in last year’s Thunderbolts*, but the reality is that he could easily have been replaced by Shang-Chi, Ms Marvel or one of the Eternals without anyone really noticing.

Making up the numbers … from left, Danai Gurira, Chadwick Boseman, Chris Evans, Scarlet Johansson and Stan in Avengers: Infinity War. Photograph: Chuck Zlotnick/AP

Marvel hasn’t really known what to do with the Winter Soldier since the Wakandans removed his Hydra programming somewhere between Civil War and Infinity War. We know he’ll be in Doomsday but do we really need him making up the numbers while the better-known Avengers prevent reality from collapsing all over again? Wouldn’t it be better to put him in a grimy $50m thriller in which the fate of one damaged man’s mind matters more than the continued existence of the entire spacetime continuum?

This could end up being a whole new thing. Give Ghost a stripped-back heist movie in which her ability to walk through walls is used to break into an actual building. Put Red Guardian into a cold war spy comedy about the increasingly implausible missions he claims to have undertaken against Captain America. Have Wong in an occult detective story involving one cursed object, three suspicious magicians and no portals to other dimensions.

An unhinged character study … Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker (2019). Photograph: DC Comics/Warner Bros/Allstar

There are also precedents suggesting that these kinds of superhero films can work, even if they are from outside the MCU. Logan was really an elegiac western with Wolverine as an ageing gunslinger ferrying a child across a hostile frontier. Joker sat far closer to the sort of unhinged urban character studies Martin Scorsese made in the 1970s and early 80s than it did to anything involving capes. Between them, these two films earned almost $1.7bn worldwide. It is also arguable that Marvel itself once made these kinds of movies. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was framed as a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, Ant-Man was configured as a heist movie, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, thanks to Sam Raimi’s distinctly Evil Dead II-style camera work, ended up with notable horror leanings. All were better movies than the lukewarm ensemble pieces that Marvel seems to have favoured in the past half-decade.

No one is arguing that Marvel should stop building towards crescendos involving the entire Avengers gang teaming up to halt the latest threat to the known universe. But there are surely more interesting ways to build interest in the lesser-known heroes who spend most of such films lurking in the background. So why not let Bucky have his $50m breakdown? He can always go back to standing behind Thor when the multiverse explodes afterwards.