Production Possibilities Frontier

For over a decade, Marvel Studios released two films a year, every one of them a hit. Iron Man, The Avengers, Black Panther, Endgame. The studio built the most consistent box office machine in cinema history, with a connected universe that grossed over $22 billion US dollars, by the time Endgame closed in 2019. In 2021, Marvel changed the equation. The studio doubled its slate to four films a year, plus a wave of streaming series for Disney Plus. Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, Spider-Man, No Way Home, all shipped in a single calendar year. The next year, three more films. The year after that, three more. Every additional film stretched the same finite group of writers, directors, post-production houses, and visual effects vendors, who had built the original empire.