The Problem With Spoiler Culture: Marvel, Media, & More

It’s time.

My eyes literally can't focus on anything in this picture.

Movies discussed in detail within: Ant-Man: Quantumania, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back, Titanic, Hadestown (not a movie), & Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Oh, and also Shakespeare. Spoilers beware, obviously.

On March 13th, a Variety article went up that detailed how Marvel Studios was issuing a DMCA subpoena demanding that Reddit identify a number of users who leaked and then spread the script for Ant-Man: Quantumania prior to the release of the movie. Amidst this legal action, the subreddit r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers has shut down, after several years of being a place where people discussed and speculated about spoilers without hesitation. Recently, the dissemination of Marvel spoilers has been more or less part and parcel with being on the internet. The entire lead-up to Spider-Man: No Way Home had people fervently discussing the rumoured cameos of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, as every interviewer pestered Garfield to break his NDA. Seemingly the only thing the marketing for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’s advertising cared about was the presence of the Illuminati and the identities of its members, which fans had been hotly speculating on. It seemed increasingly like fans’ primary interest was in reveals and cameos over actual story beats, and Marvel was likewise primarily interested in structuring their films around working in more and more familiar characters and actors. This led to something of a spoilers arms race - Marvel trying to fill their movies more and more with “spoilable” content for fans to be excited about, and fans working ever harder to learn about these details before the films’ release. Marvel’s close-lipped policy has been something of a running gag for a while now; the press circuit before Avengers: Endgame was filled with actors revealing how they’d been given fragments of scripts and had been sworn to secrecy. For a time, the secrecy was part of the draw. Endgame’s marketing revealed practically nothing about the movie and insisted that its potential audience come to theatres to see the film as soon as possible so that the experience was not “spoiled” by online discussion. The gamble paid off, and Endgame grossed well over a billion dollars on its opening weekend. No Way Home relied on a similar strategy, holding off its coveted reveals, and grossed over 600 million on its opening weekend, even despite the hesitation that surrounded theatres in 2021.

The framing here is really good I just wish the lighting was good enough to match.

But over the last year, the Marvel model has crashed spectacularly, culminating in the release of the aforementioned Ant-Man: Quantumania. With the exception of No Way Home, Marvel features have been unable to meet their projected expectations after the rise of the novel coronavirus, and while the climactic Spider-Man entry brought audiences back to theatres for Marvel, the numbers have quickly been dropping again. Quantumania grossed “only” 106 million in its opening, almost half of its projected budget. There are any number of reasons for this drop: for one, the over-correction to streaming that occurred during the height of the pandemic has had serious ripples in the way audiences see movies. If the next big Marvel tentpole release is just going to go up on Disney+ a month after it hits theatres, why spend the money to see it on the big screen? This attitude is exasperated by the declining quality of Marvel releases post-Endgame; by my estimate, only Shang Chi has quite come close to capturing the early Marvel magic. The studio made a grab at awards season attention with Wakanda Forever, but not even Angela Bassett doing the thing could net Marvel an acting Oscar (though they did win for Best Costume Design, which I think was largely a fair win despite being yet another Oscar that could have gone to Babylon). One could also blame Quantumania’s relatively paltry performance on the bizarre direction of the plot - taking a movie series that had, until this time, been low-stakes heist family dramas and pivoting it towards a Dune-esque “epic” setting up the next big bad. Are people really that interested in seeing light-hearted Scott Lang fight the next Darth Vader equivalent? Despite these and other possibilities, Marvel’s recent legal action suggests the studio had pinned the problem on a different culprit: spoiler culture. The thing that they, themselves, created.

I looked up and down for good, HD Quantumania pictures. This is the best I got.

Now, I think this line of reasoning is very dumb - not only because of its obvious silliness but because it is reliant on a cultural phenomenon that is, itself, very dumb. The current culture around spoilers is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely absurd. Studios like Marvel and the rabid fanbases that obsess about them have co-created an attitude around spoilers that is actively inhibiting not only basic media literacy but has also held these studios back from making actively fun and interesting art. I’m coming out of the gate swinging here, so I want to acknowledge off the top that I am infringing on some very “old man yells at cloud” territory here. There are many people with perfectly fine reservations about spoilers - even I prefer to go into things blind whenever possible. But there is a festering attitude about spoilers that has been bothering me for a number of years now, and this Marvel debacle feels like the appropriate time to finally dig into it in detail. Because I fear the way we talk about spoilers has totally broken our brains. There’s this attitude that if we go into a movie knowing anything about it, that knowledge will destroy our relationship with the movie - in some cases, even if that thing is a deeply nebulous impression, like “somebody thought this movie was bad” (This is a real story. Someone really once messaged me because I said that I wasn’t a fan of a movie and they were upset that I ruined their experience)! I’m sorry, but that will not stand. Movies are more than a series of reveals and stories are more than hushed secrets we have to keep to ourselves. Spoiler culture is reaching a critical mass and we need to have a conversation about it.

Ant-Man is as good a place to start as any. Quantumania is an especially funny case for Marvel to be cracking down on, because as a movie, it really doesn’t have anything in it that I would consider a “spoiler.” None of the characters go through any significant changes, the plot is never overturned in any dramatic way; the team goes to the Quantum Realm, learns of an evil guy ruling everything, and then defeats him. That’s the movie. Everything else is just kind of window dressing. Which leads me to wonder, what is it about this movie that people think is worth spoiling? What is it about Quantumania that Marvel thinks is worth threatening legal action over? This isn’t Endgame, where we have massive character choices and exciting reveals that fans have been waiting years for (unless we are counting MODOK, I guess, who is largely excluded from advertising but does not seem in any way like a “spoiler” to me. My moviegoing experience is not at all altered by the knowledge that MODOK is in the film). And it isn’t No Way Home, where fan-favorite actors are returning as their beloved characters. This is Ant-Man: Quantumania, a “just okay” at best movie that is more interested in introducing Kang for future movies than giving its main character anything to do.

Jonathan Majors is doing some heavy lifting in this movie, but I can't help but feel like Kang is tonally and thematically very out of place.

In fact, the trailer makes for a more interesting movie: the advertising for Quantumania centered around Kang promising to give Scott more time with his daughter if he helped Kang fulfill his goals. This choice is completely absent from the movie! Instead, Kang just promises to kill Scott’s daughter, and Scott is forced to fulfill Kang's wishes. Maybe if they had gone down this original route, and Scott had chosen to help Kang out of his own volition, that could be a spoiler. It would at least be an interesting character choice for Scott, with huge potential consequences. One trailer has Scott declaring that he doesn’t have to beat Kang, “we just both have to lose.” When we hear this line in the context of the movie, the audience is prepared for some sort of Pyrrhic ending, where Scott has to make some sort of sacrifice to stop Kang from escaping the Quantum Realm. That I could consider a spoiler. But no such thing happens - our heroes are able to seal him in the Quantum Realm and go back home with relatively little issue. Now, surprisingly, the leaked script (which I haven’t read) apparently has a much more interesting ending, in which Scott and Hope are left trapped in the Quantum Realm and Kang would escape - this would be a spoiler! It would be a massive plot moment with clear consequences for its characters and story world. So why change it? Did the plot being leaked cause Marvel to course-correct for a safer ending? And why? If changes were made to fit in with the broader plan for Avengers: Kang Dynasty, that is one thing, but why subpoena Reddit over it? Are they irked by the knowledge that a better, more interesting script is floating around on the internet? Do they think their box office numbers were hurt by these higher expectations being squandered?

The fact is that movies change in the edit. I’m not bothered that there was a better version of Quantumania at some point - the same is true of countless other movies. What bothers me is the studio's response. It bothers me twofold - one, because it suggests a sort of arrogant view that people primarily engage with stories for the “spoilers,” and two, because it suggests a willingness to actively change the story in order to keep it “surprising” rather than keep it “good.” I never followed Westwold, but people who did describe a similar phenomenon, where fans would figure out plot details in advance from the well-laid foreshadowing, only for the showrunners to change things completely just so that they could have a win over their audience. This is, suffice it to say, a bad way to tell a story! And, at its core, this is the thing that unnerves me about the fandom and studio obsession with “spoilers” - it reveals an apathy for what actually makes movies special, and that’s the story and characters.

It's genuinely jarring how much better this movie looks than anything in Quantumania.

Let me put it into perspective. What is the biggest spoiler of modern pop culture? Surely it is that famous twist in Empire Strikes Back, when we learn that the evil Darth Vader is actually our hero’s father, who we thought was dead. And why is this moment so renowned? Because it changes the dynamics of the entire story. Suddenly, what we thought was a simple story of good fighting evil becomes a complicated family drama. Moreover, it alters the way we view our cast, and how they view themselves. Luke Skywalker cannot just be a simple farmboy anymore, he has a huge responsibility on his shoulders. And Vader isn’t a simple, uncomplicated evil anymore, but a very personal force Luke must learn to overcome. It also calls into question the goals of Ben Kenobi and Yoda, who let Luke believe his father was dead and that Vader was a monolithic force of darkness. The Vader reveal is a spoiler because it changes how you watch the movie. It changes how you think of the themes the story is telling - it changes what the story itself is on a fundamental level. Perhaps importantly, it changes the story for the better. While modern Star Wars’ obsession with lineages and legacies is exhausting, it’s worth noting that it got that way because, initially, it made for good storytelling. It’s a twist that made the story more personal for Luke and thus more personal for the audience. The same can be said of all of my favourite reveals. I think a lot about The Prestige in regards to this conversation; it’s a movie that fundamentally changes when you rewatch it, and knowing the big reveals actually enhances the experience of the film. Your subsequent watches of The Prestige drive you to pay closer attention to the story, to the ideas, and to see how they are all building up to the reveals at the end of the movie. A good twist crystalizes the ideas of your story and cements them in the mind of your audience. There are a lot of superfluous details in Empire Strikes Back that you’ll probably forget - but you’ll never forget the relationship between Vader and Luke.

Framing! Lighting! Blocking! I didn't mean for this to be a critique of recent Marvel's visual style and yet-

If these twists and reveals carry so much weight, it would stand to reason one would want to avoid having them spoiled. And that’s fair! I certainly wouldn’t want to take anyone’s first experience with The Prestige away from them, and I am always fascinated by people who are able to watch Empire without knowing anything beforehand. But the beauty of a truly good story is that it doesn’t matter what you know beforehand. Again, a good twist is doing more than just shocking the audience for fun and profit, it is revealing something essential about the story. Citizen Kane is entirely built around the search to find out what Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” could mean - but going into the movie already knowing the identity of Rosebud doesn’t make it any worse of a movie. Rather, it just gives you a hint as to what sort of themes and ideas the movie is working with. After all, Citizen Kane is about so much more than its central mystery, it’s a deeply prescient tale about consumerism and corporate greed, and the central character’s loss of identity. “Rosebud” is just the cleanest thesis of those themes. The beauty of a good movie, like Citizen Kane, is that they still hit me despite knowing key details in advance. After all, what good would a story be if you could only hear it once? The best narratives don’t rely on the purity of being unspoiled to retain their goodness, rather, they are built with the assumption that they will be told many times, and that their meaning will only deepen over the course of the retelling.

Contrast Empire with Quantumania. In Empire, the relationship between Luke and Vader becomes a synthesizing point showing the similarities and differences between the two figures. Quantumania spends a lot of time recounting the relationship that Janet van Dyne had with Kang, but by my memory, the two never actually interact in the present. That relationship makes Kang more “interesting” in the sense that we know more of his history, but it doesn’t seem to affect his motivations or our understanding of him in any meaningful way. It’s just additional information. And since Janet isn’t our protagonist and isn’t really driving the movie outside of her desire to leave the Quantum Realm, it doesn’t make her much more complex either (come to think of it, why spend all this time giving Kang background with Janet instead of introducing him in a Fantastic Four movie, characters he has a built-in connection to?).

Like why is this scene at night? Why can you never tell what's happening? This should be a huge moment!

Alternatively, take the “spoilers” in No Way Home - broadly, people will be referring to the cameos from MacGuire and Garfield, or Charlie Cox if they really have taste. But none of these cameos are quite worthy of being called “spoilers” in my opinion. Knowing that the other Spider-Men are in the movie wouldn’t substantially change your viewing experience - at least, not in terms of changing how you take in the themes and story. Rewatching No Way Home would be a fundamentally identical experience, with one notable change: you become jarringly aware of how much those reveals rely on audience excitement to hold any water. You need that opening weekend buzz for the cameos to actually hit, because otherwise, they feel like awkward dead air, waiting for the crowd to applaud. Spoiling these moments don’t ruin the movie, they just temper artificial excitement. The Vader reveal still hits all these years later because of how it affects the characters; in twenty years, I can’t imagine anyone getting very excited over rewatching a studio crossover. This becomes all the more jarring when you remember that there are genuinely shocking story twists in No Way Home that fundamentally shape Holland’s Spider-Man and the journey he takes, but they tend to get swept under the rug with the shock and awe of the cameo appearances.

That is, I think, the real indictment of Marvel’s obsession with fostering spoiler culture. Their reliance on spoilers and shocking moments and keeping audience excitement at a fever pitch reveals that they don’t actually have any confidence in their storytelling anymore. A good story retains its excitement every time. You can return to it time and time again and it still holds its value. As an example, I just watched Titanic for the first time this February, and as much as I grew up hearing people joke about, “what’s the point? We already know the boat sinks!” the movie itself knows that you know that boat sinks and is all the better for it. In fact, it spends its first thirty minutes with characters who know that the boat has sunk, who tell you the fine details of how the boat sank, and then begin telling you why it was important that the boat sank, all so that by the time you get to the actual iceberg you feel the full force of it. It’s not supposed to be a surprise, it’s supposed to be effective. Lindsay Ellis, in her video essay on why Titanic is good, actually, links this structural move to the genre of tragedy, and specifically how that genre is explored in Anaïs Mitchell’s award-winning musical Hadestown.

I neeeeed to see Hadestown live you don't understand.

The musical adapts the famous myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, how they fell in love, how Eurydice fell to the Underworld, and how Orpheus fails at the very last minute to save her from Hades’ grasp. “It’s an old song [...] it’s a sad tale / it’s a tragedy / and we’re going to sing it again” since Hermes, our narrator, in the opening number. “See, someone’s got to tell the tale / whether or not it turns out well / Maybe it will turn out this time?” Hadestown is a musical that only gets better on repeat listens because it is inherently aware of the way we engage with stories. Our current obsession with avoiding spoilers, as perpetuated by studios like Marvel, assumes that we get one, singular, pure movie-watching experience and that it’s our job to ensure that experience is preserved as perfectly as possible, isolated by any outside interference (where have I heard that before…?). Hadestown, like any good narrative, understands that stories are passed down, that the real joy in a truly good story is in digesting it, in seeing it through various angles. The central tension in Hadestown is that we do know how the story ends, but we learn to hope and thus to act as if things might end better. This is not just a good way to engage with stories, it’s a centrally human way to engage with life.

The fact is, sure, you will only watch a movie unspoiled once. And if you want to go about seeing that movie knowing as little as possible, I think that’s fine. I watch any number of movies knowing nothing but the director or a core premise! But in making movies specifically designed so as to be watched in theatres to preserve their maximum artificial excitement, studios like Marvel turn storytelling into commodified slop. In its heyday, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was rooted in telling long-form stories of characters changing over several movies. I’ll never forget my excitement coming out of Captain America: Winter Soldier, figuring the presence of Bucky and Hydra in the Marvel world would fundamentally change things. They did not. And while those reveals still land with me because of how rooted they are in Captain America’s character, I can’t see any future Marvel movie having the same impact. At some point on the road to Endgame, Marvel realized they could manufacture excitement with their spoiler protocols instead of with their characters. When they lost their momentum during the pandemic, that entire process fell apart. This is why more and more people I talk to are exhausted with the MCU, because Marvel has been unable to produce the same investment in their characters and the same fever-pitch energy around seeing things as soon as possible. This is the reason Marvel thinks subpoenaing Reddit might save their box office, because if people know the plot of their movie before it releases, why would they go see the movie itself? They’re not interested in storytelling, they’re interested in selling a product.

The real point is that when a studio has confidence in their product they can afford to give it colour instead of cameos. People laboured love on Macbeth (2015). Did they do the same for Ant-Man?

And sure, you can make this argument with any studio or company that makes art. At some level, it is all a capitalistic venture. But usually, there is some heart to it, whether a team working on a passion project or some singular visionary. I’ve had a few conversations recently about classical art, and how it was almost always sponsored by royalty. The vast majority of Shakespeare’s work was written and performed for the monarchy, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t individual brilliance in it worthy of exploring. And, for that matter, just because we know how many of his plays end doesn’t make them unworthy of studying. If stories are only good for their unspoiled experience, then nobody would be staging Macbeth or Hamlet. We wouldn’t have a million renditions of Romeo & Juliet. Stories aren’t only good as a means to learn how they end, stories are good in and of themselves. They’re about the journey, the things we take from them, and the way they change for us over time. Stories are brilliant for how every element adds into a cohesive whole, and it takes multiple experiences, often in different life contexts, for us to fully appreciate much of what a work has to offer. You don’t need to cram a story full of spoilery bits and celebrity cameos for it to be good - if anything, that actively makes it worse. Could you imagine if, for instance, in Multiverse of Madness Doctor Strange ran into the Ancient One, instead of Professor X, on the Illuminati? The Ancient One, a character Strange has an actual history and relationship with, someone who was his mentor, instead of Professor X, who is just some bald guy as far as Strange is concerned? Sure, we wouldn’t get Patrick Stewart back, but we could get a genuine character moment that actually tells a story. God forbid. But Patrick Stewart gets people in seats, so the capitalist machine wins in the end.

I mean, the visual clutter here all has an obvious point. A thematic point. And the lighting still puts your focus first on Michelle Yeoh and secondly on the TV, which becomes important.

The funny thing to me is, since starting this blog, I have come to learn that you can talk with depth about most movies without even touching on spoilers. I made it my mission to make my basic reviews as spoiler-free as possible, and only to dig into the plot in deeper discussions. Upon doing so, I realized quickly that these spoilers frequently have nothing to do with the actual themes and story of the movie. Or, to put it nicer, the details of the plot are frequently just means to a thematic end. Take, for example, my review of recent Best Picture winner, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (in which I accidentally predict it being the movie of the year). It’s a dense, plot-y movie, with a lot of time spent on the mechanics of verse-jumping and with all sorts of visual gags. You could get lost in all of those, trying to navigate the different beats of the story, but that doesn’t actually tell you what the story is. It’s a story about love and hope, about overcoming the overwhelming pressures of the world. Of course, you’re not going to get everything by engaging with media this way, but it does tell you how far you can get without “spoiling” anything. Because our relationship with twists and reveals are not in the moments themselves, but in everything around them. Again, if a movie was only good unspoiled, it would stop being good after you first watched it! People don’t rewatch Lord of the Rings every year to avoid it being spoiled, they rewatch it because it’s a good story. Because I still cry every time Sam says that there’s good in this world, because I still cheer every time Rohan answers Gondor’s call for aid. Because good movies are more than just a capitalistic endeavor to get people to watch things on opening weekend. But a hollow story is only good once. I’ve talked more than I could ever want to about Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker, but it bears noting that my first watch of the movie was relatively fun! There’s a lot going on, a lot of different plots and twists thrown at you. But every time I rewatch it, it becomes increasingly clear how none of it sticks together, none of it goes anywhere. It’s all just shock for the sake of shock. And that doesn’t last.

Just this still image makes me emotional! The people who made this movie cared about it!

Please note that I’m not just being contrarian or anti-populist here. I think it’s easy to defend Marvel by saying “well they’re popcorn movies, they’re not supposed to be complicated!” But I would describe Empire Strikes Back as a popcorn movie, Lord of the Rings was a box office tyrant and so was Titanic. Shakespeare’s plays were the popcorn movies of their day. The problem isn’t that Marvel movies are popular, the problem is that they’re hollow. That, especially recently, they don’t care about telling a cohesive story and only care about getting you to stick around for the next release. Countless reviews of Quantumania could be summed up by the sentiment that, while the movie itself was lacking, it at least set up a really compelling villain for future movies! No! I’m all for set-up, I was all in on the Marvel brand, but that can’t be the only thing a story is doing. There’s a reason that Marvel’s releases took a backseat at the box office this year to movies like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, and Avatar: The Way of Water: it’s because those movies were all made with heart and craft. They’re real movies, they’re stories in a way the last few Marvel movies simply haven’t been. They tell complete narratives with moving character arcs and compelling ideas. They are good! I have seen a lot of talk about the dearth of media literacy, and this seems to be a big part of the puzzle. Pop art never used to rely on this level of artificial first-weekend excitement. The entire reason Titanic made so much money was because it was good and people wanted to see it multiple times! Opening weekend has always been important, but the spoiler bubble has changed the game, and we’re beginning to see what happens when it pops.

Marvel needs to be investing in its Tulkun cast. Until Payakan the whale is in a Marvel movie I will have critiques.

Maybe this still sounds pretty “old man yells at cloud,” but I suppose I’m broadly comfortable with that. And rest assured, there is still a large part of me that is emotionally tied to that “purity of first experience” idea! I’m definitely not going out of my way to spoil things for myself, and I’m certainly not going to become one of those people actively trying to spoil things for others. I certainly don’t know why someone would consider Andrew Garfield’s presence in No Way Home a spoiler (if anything, Garfield’s presence is one of the biggest reasons to watch a movie in the first place), but I can respect trying to avoid that knowledge. I myself wasn’t a fan of the fact that I couldn’t look anywhere on the internet without being bombarded by it months beforehand, so I get it. I think it’s perfectly fine to have a personal policy about spoilers - boundaries are good! I’m still certainly not looking to have anything spoiled for me (this message goes out to anyone reading this article and deciding they can start spoiling things for the bit. That’s not what I’m saying!), I just think it’s more and more important to be aware of how much this studio-controlled spoiler narrative is a machine for profit. It’s all intended to drive up those opening weekend sales. Because if you’re anxious about your spoiler virginity and you know the whole world will be talking about this movie in a week, you’re going to go out of your way to see it that opening weekend. Even if after a month you never think about it again.

I thought that Quantumania was fine. I think the last several Marvel releases have been fine! But we could be doing better. We used to be better. So long as we privilege stories that prefer shocking, in the moment reveals and opening weekend excitement over well-told stories, the problem is going to get worse. But I believe in you. And maybe, with a few steps back, we can begin to see the bigger picture and make better art, art that withstands multiple watches and travels with us through many avenues of life. That’s the sort of movie I’m interested in.