You may have noticed that Marvel’s string of box office records came to an end a few years ago. Since the release of “Avengers: Endgame” the company has had more disappointments than reasons to celebrate. Today, Variety has a story about what has been going on inside the company as it struggles to deal with a long list of problems starting with the arrest of Jonathan Majors, the actor who was set up to be the next major villain after Thanos. This was said to be the top issue at Marvel’s annual retreat in Palm Springs.

The most pressing issue to be discussed at the retreat was what to do about Jonathan Majors, the actor who had been poised to carry the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but instead is headed to a high-profile trial in New York later this month on domestic violence charges. The actor insists he is the victim, but the damage to his reputation and the chance he could lose the case has forced Marvel to reconsider its plans to center the next phase of its interlocking slate of sequels, spinoffs and series around Majors’ villainous character, Kang the Conqueror.

Maybe if Marvel was just starting down this road there would be time to turn back and find a new villain. But Kang was already set up in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and even more so in the season 2 of the streaming series “Loki” which has been centered on Kang and which is set to end next week by making him a major threat to the entire Marvel universe.

“Marvel is truly f***ed with the whole Kang angle,” says one top dealmaker who has seen the final “Loki” episode. “And they haven’t had an opportunity to rewrite until very recently [because of the WGA strike]. But I don’t see a path to how they move forward with him.”

Aside from these storyline problems in the near future, Marvel is also dealing with more immediate problems involving bag CGI in both movies and TV shows and expectations that their next film, “The Marvels,” is going to underperform despite its $250 million budget and lots of expensive reshoots. According to Variety, the director just moved away and started on another project two months before “The Marvels” was finished with post-production.

[Nia] DaCosta began working on another film while “The Marvels” was still in postproduction — the filmmaker moved to London earlier this year to begin prepping for her Tessa Thompson drama “Hedda.”

I don’t know what prompted that but it sounds like DaCosta wanted to be well into her next project before “The Marvels” hit theaters. Maybe that’s because she knows it’s going to be a bomb.

Speaking of bombs, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” didn’t do very well. It had a big opening weekend and then suffered the worst drop-off of any Marvel film. In the end it made about $150 million less than the 2nd Ant-Man film. One of the major critiques of the film at the time was that some of the CGI looked really terrible. It turns out that was partly the result of switching slots with “The Marvels” which was originally scheduled to come out first.

The schedule swap with “The Marvels” had left the “Ant-Man” sequel in a squeeze, pushing up its postproduction schedule by four-and-a-half months. Marvel films are known for coming down to the wire, given Feige’s ability “to foam the runway and land a plane that way,” says one executive familiar with how the company operates. But this level of unfinished was unprecedented and would be noted in scathing reviews when the tentpole with the $200 million budget opened 11 days after the premiere. Critics weren’t the only ones dismayed. Fed up with 14-hour days and no overtime, Marvel VFX workers voted unanimously to unionize in September, sparking an industrywide trend.

The Disney executive in charge of VFX was fired but the Variety article suggests it’s not clear how much of the problem was her fault. For instance, VFX problems on the show “She-Hulk” were really the result of poor writing not poor VFX workers. Specifically, the original scripts for the show had a flashback to how the main character became She-Hulk in the 8th of 9 episodes. But Disney execs later decided some of that needed to be placed in episode one, which meant the deadline for the effects was suddenly pushed up by a couple of months. The result was that some of the final FX shots weren’t added to the show until after episodes had already started streaming.

A lot of this sounds like the result of Marvel being a bit too ambitious. Starting in 2008 they were releasing films on average about once a year. Then in 2013 they accelerated to 2 films per year. In 2017 they moved to three films per year. There was a pause in 2020 because of the pandemic but that’s when Disney ordered Marvel to start creating lots of content for its Disney+ streaming platform. In 2021, Marvel resumed the three movies per year schedule but also added in a bunch of new shows including WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If?, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Secret Invasion and more. Maybe they just don’t have enough talented people to keep up this pace.

There have been reports that some of these shows are falling apart during production. Daredevil: Born Again paused production because of the writer’s strike this summer and that gave the executives time to look over what they had. They apparently decided it was awful because they fired the writers and directors and announced they were rebooting a series that was already about half finished.

So, in late September, Marvel quietly let go of head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman and also released the directors for the remainder of the season as part of a significant creative reboot of the series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The studio is now on the hunt for new writers and directors for the project, which stars Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer turned superhero…

The show is Marvel’s first to feature a hero who already had a successful series on Netflix, running three seasons. But sources say that Corman and Ord crafted a legal procedural that did not resemble the Netflix version, known for its action and violence. Cox didn’t even show up in costume until the fourth episode. Marvel, after greenlighting the concept, found itself needing to rethink the original intention of the show.

Marvel plans to keep some scenes and episodes, though other serialized elements will be injected, with Corman and Ord becoming executive producers on the two-season series.

And finally, the Variety story does touch on some of the other issues we’ve seen with Disney’s recent approach to nearly everything:

As public criticism mounts, Feige is pulling the plug on scripts and projects that aren’t working. Case in point: the “Blade” reboot. With Mahershala Ali signed on for the eponymous role of a vampire, things looked promising for a 2023 release date. But the project has gone through at least five writers, two directors and one shutdown six weeks before production. One person familiar with the script permutations says the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons. Blade was relegated to the fourth lead, a bizarre idea considering that the studio had two-time Oscar winner Ali on board.

Amid reports that Ali was ready to exit over script issues, Feige went back to the drawing board and hired Michael Green, the Oscar-nominated writer of “Logan,” to start anew.

That’s one woke train wreck which was stopped before it happened. You have to wonder how many more of these are in the pipeline.

In the grand scheme of things, the arrest of actor Jonathan Majors isn’t Marvel’s big problem. Marvel’s big problem is that a lot of their recent shows and movies haven’t been very good. It won’t matter who is playing Kang the Conqueror if no one goes to see the film.