Yesterday actor Jonathan Majors was convicted of misdemeanor assault and harassment of his former girlfriend. He was acquitted on two other charges and his attorney framed it as a partial vindication.

In a statement, Majors’ attorney Priya Chaudhry said in part: “It is clear that the jury did not believe Grace Jabbari’s story of what happened in the SUV because they found that Mr. Majors did not intentionally cause any injuries to her. We are grateful for that.”

“We are disappointed, however, that despite not believing Ms. Jabbari, the jury nevertheless found that Mr. Majors was somehow reckless while she was attacking him,” she added.

“Mr. Majors is grateful to God, his family, his friends, and his fans for their love and support during these harrowing eight months. Mr. Majors still has faith in the process and looks forward to fully clearing his name,” Chaudhry went on to say.

Maybe that means he plans to appeal the conviction? He is facing up to a year in jail but assuming this is his first conviction he may get probation. I was never really clear on what led to all of this but his ex-girlfriend testified about the incident on the stand.

On her first day of testimony this month she gave jurors a full account of what happened, speaking publicly for the first time about the episode. She said that Mr. Majors had received a flirty text from another woman, and that she had grabbed his phone out of his hand. First, she said, he tried to pry her fingers away; then he twisted her hand and her arm.

“Next,” she said, “I felt like a really hard blow across my head.”

Eventually, she said, Mr. Majors asked the driver to stop the vehicle. Video that jurors watched showed Mr. Majors jumping out, followed by Ms. Jabbari. He turned around, picked her up and placed her back in the car, appearing to push her back in when she tried to get out.

It doesn’t really matter at this point what the sentence is because hours after the conviction, Marvel announced it was dropping him. In the short run he’ll be missing out on a big payday for playing the main villain in the next Avengers film. However, given the way things have been going at Marvel he may eventually be grateful he wasn’t part of it.

The Marvel franchise is in a state of flux right now, with audience goodwill dwindling with each new entrant. Post “Avengers: Endgame” the studio has struggled with consistency of quality and box office returns. Disney CEO Bob Iger has been publicly critical of the studio, saying on several occasions that Disney needs to be more selective about which Marvel superheroes get sequel films and when to bring in fresh stories…

In the same way that Josh Brolin’s Thanos was the over-arching antagonist of the first decade of Marvel’s theatrical storytelling, Major’s Kang was established to be the next, culminating in another Avengers team-up movie in 2026 called “The Kang Dynasty.”

With Majors’ conviction, Disney now has to make a choice: recast the role of Kang or completely alter its plans for the MCU.

Marvel is said to already be busy rewriting Avengers 5. Whether they recast the role of Kang the Conqueror or write him out as the main villain really isn’t the point. The point is that by 2026 no one will be going to see these movies if the quality keeps dropping with each release. Marvel was forced to take a break in 2020 because of the pandemic but since it started releasing films again in 2021 the results have been mixed. Here’s the list:

Black Widow (2021)
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
Eternals (2021)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023)
The Marvels (2023)

Black Widow disappointed and Disney was sued by Scarlett Johansson for shorting her salary by putting the film on its Disney+ streaming service. Shang-Chi was a decent entry but it also didn’t do very well at the box office. Eternals was a flop which has a 47% reviewers rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Spider-Man: No Way Home was the one legitimate hit on this list which got great reviews and made a ton of money (nearly $2 billion). Doctor Strange also did decently well (nearly a billion worldwide) but Thor: Love and Thunder was another middling film which didn’t seem to generate much enthusiasm. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever got good reviews and made money but not at the level of the first entry (largely because of the loss of Chadwick Boseman). Ant-Man 3 was a disappointment which was heavily criticized for its mediocre special effects. Guardians Vol. 3 did about as well as Vol. 2. Finally, the Marvels is Disney’s biggest flop to date with a money-losing worldwide gross of just over $200 million. To put that in perspective, that’s about half of what Eternals made.

So out of 10 films you have one huge hit with Spider-Man and several decent performers including Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Thor and Guardians. But you also have some flops like Eternals and Marvels and several films that underperformed: Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Ant Man. Marvel has gone from about a 90% hit rate to about a 50% hit rate since the pandemic. And that doesn’t include all of the TV shows, some of which were decent, some of which were pretty forgettable and some of which have been awful.

Marvel made its success by raiding the genius of some storylines and characters created way back in the 1960. Those stories were full of primary colors and excitement. But since then they’ve mostly been majoring on the minors. I’m not sure they can get their mojo back but if they can it will probably come from going back to some of that early source material, i.e. the Fantastic Four, X-Men and some of the characters that are really synonymous with the Marvel brand (Wolverine, Professor X, Doctor Doom, the Human Torch, etc.) It’s not a coincidence that the one huge hit on that list above was Spider-Man.

If it were up to me, Marvel would go back to releasing just 2 films per year and making half as many TV shows. Better to extend the run of real hits than turn Marvel into a hit-and-miss content factory which is what it is becoming.