Marvel have released twelve MCU movies in the last eight years: the least successful was their second, The Incredible Hulk, a film that made well over quarter of a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales and probably just about scraped a profit. The top three - both Avengers movies and Iron Man 3 - have made over $4billion between them in worldwide ticket sales. Even this years Ant-Man made over half a billion dollars. Its a sign of the end times: fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, dogs and cats living together, and an Ant-Man movie outperformed the last Wolverine movie. Thats happened because Marvel have built a brand that moviegoers trust. The belief is that a new Marvel movie will be worth the increasingly ludicrous cost of a cinema ticket, as well as the remortgage necessary to buy popcorn and a bucket of flat cola. This isnt a canny appraisal of the talents involved, the nature of the project and a broad estimate of the likely quality of the film its an article of faith. Its a sad fact that years of being let down will bludgeon the goodwill of even the most fanatical WWE fan. Both RAW and Smackdown's ratings are far lower than they should be, despite the easy availability of both shows to watch. RAW is too long and dull, and fans have been conditioned to believe that nothing that happens on Smackdown actually matters. Storylines are advanced on RAW and repeated on Smackdown: its a glorified house show. Fan favourites like Dean Ambrose and Cesaro are marginalised while WWE focuses on pet projects like Roman Reigns. Sasha Banks was the most popular female wrestler in the company when she debuted on RAW, but that was back in July and Banks has been sidelined for five months in favour of storylines involving Nikki Bella, Paige and Charlotte who knows what will happen in another five months? Fundamentally, fans are beginning to lose heart. For years, WWE have responded to criticism of their product with a snide rejoinder that the smarks and internet fans complaining will still carry on watching well, thats no longer the case, as increasingly lifelong WWE fans are tuning out of the product. The biggest lesson that WWE can learn from Marvel is, quite simply, that if the customer trusts you, theyll buy your product as a matter of course. Whether WWE will ever regain the trust of the fanbase kind of depends on the changes theyre prepared to make to the way that they run their business.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
