Studios Built Empty Universes, Now They're Paying the Price

Supergirl bombed at the box office, so did Blue Beetle, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and The Flash before it.

The prevailing explanation is clean and comfortable—audiences have grown exhausted by the expanded-universe model. Too many mediocre spinoffs, too many minor characters nobody asked about, and the appetite for interconnected franchises has simply vanished.

But this diagnosis mistakes a symptom for the disease. The argument assumes that studios build universes because audiences demand them. That if the MCU and DC had polled viewers first, they'd have found genuine appetite for deep-cut character arcs.

What the assumption collapses is the difference between audience fatigue and audience capture. When Marvel executives greenlit The Eternals—a film about literally nobody—they weren't responding to market demand. They were responding to IP accounting, where a character in the Marvel catalog has value only if you monetize it. The entire business model depends on extracting revenue from the portfolio, not on whether each extraction makes creative sense.

Marvel and DC didn't discover audiences wanted expanded universes. They invented universes and then spent a decade convincing audiences that this was how cinema worked now. The studios built their entire production pipeline around this architecture, hedging every dollar on the assumption that the strategy would compound infinitely. It didn't—not because audiences got tired of spinoffs. Because most spinoffs were creatively hollow and existed to serve franchise mechanics, not story.

The real question isn't whether the expanded-universe model is unsustainable. It's whether the studios will admit that the creative bankruptcy they're experiencing now flows directly from the choices they made when audiences had no leverage to refuse. They optimized for reach and portfolio extraction when they could have optimized for whether a story actually needed to exist.

Now they're trapped in a structure that punishes them for the efficiency they once rewarded.