Has Marvel Lost Its Magic?
The Sam Sanders Show
KCRW & Sam Sanders
4.9 • 711 Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2025
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After almost 20 years of box office dominance, is the Marvel Cinematic Universe starting to fall apart?
Sam dives deep into the highs and lows of Marvel with two sharp pop culture minds, Kyle Buchanan (NY Times) and Tracy Brown (LA Times), exploring what’s gone wrong in recent years — and whether Thunderbolts* marks a real reset or just more of the same. They dig into Marvel’s pivot to TV, the fatigue of endless interconnected stories, and what the MCU could learn from newer hits like Sinners. Plus, will video game adaptations become Hollywood’s next big hit?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey listeners, it is the season of giving. |
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| 0:20.0 | Hey, y'all, it's the Sam Sanders show from KCRW, your weekly guide to entertainment and pop culture. |
| 0:26.8 | Thank you so much for checking out my show. |
| 0:30.3 | This week, Marvel and its legacy, the good and the bad. |
| 0:35.7 | There are some Marvel movies. |
| 0:44.6 | Iron Man, Black Panther One and Two, that Last Guardians of the Galaxy, those films I love. |
| 0:50.4 | But for the last few years, a lot of Marvel movies have been bad, in my opinion. |
| 0:56.7 | And I've been wondering for a while now, has Marvel lost its way? There's so much Marvel content to keep up with these days, and Marvel's had more flops than they've wanted these last |
| 1:01.6 | few years. But this weekend, maybe a chance to turn things around. There's a new Marvel film |
| 1:08.0 | out. It's called Thunderbolts. I saw it. I liked it. And it might represent a Marvel reset. To discuss all of this, I am joined by two journalists who cover this stuff full time. Los Angeles Times entertainment reporter Tracy Brown and Kyle Buchanan, who covers Hollywood and pop culture for The New York Times. |
| 1:28.0 | Let's get into it. |
| 1:31.4 | To start this Marvel conversation, as journalists who cover movies and cover Marvel, |
| 1:38.0 | do you get tired of the Wither Marvel questions? |
| 1:41.6 | Is Marvel in trouble? What's up with the MCU questions? |
| 1:45.9 | I feel like twas ever thus. Even when Marvel was becoming a really big thing, there was always |
| 1:51.1 | the expectation that it would burn out at some point. And there have been some bad Marvel movies |
| 1:56.3 | in the past, you know, like not everything after that initial salvo of Iron Man Thor, Captain |
| 2:02.7 | America worked well. In fact, Iron Man 2, the second Thor movie, those weren't stellar releases |
| 2:08.5 | either. But they always do manage to bounce back, even after a prolonged period of Marvel's |
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