One of the big stories in movies last year was the struggles of Marvel Studios. The failure of The Marvels laid bare the many challenges of its once-dominant Marvel Cinematic Universe, as did the firing of actor Jonathan Majors, who was to play the main antagonist of its next set of movies.

But Marvel’s main rival, DC, also struggled in 2024. Shazam! Fury of the Gods and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, sequels to popular films, both collapsed relative to their predecessors. They were the last two entries in DC’s initial botched effort to create its own cinematic universe, which has now gone out with a whimper.

The question now is whether 2023 proves to be a turning point for this genre’s popularity or merely an aberration. It wasn’t impossible for comic-book movies to succeed last year. The animated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse dramatically improved upon its predecessor’s success. And James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did about as well as the first two. But the presumption of success for such movies seems to have been lost.

There appears to be some recognition of this reality. This year, Marvel will release only one movie, Deadpool 3. It will bring back both the popular titular character (played by Ryan Reynolds) and Hugh Jackman’s well-received Wolverine. And Gunn is now spearheading a new DC cinematic universe. It will have no theatrical releases next year (though Todd Phillips’s Joker is getting a sequel). We’re entering a period of retooling and retrenchment for both comic-book heavyweights.

So 2024 is when we will begin to learn for certain whether the comic-book genre’s popularity can continue or has peaked. If the latter is to be its fate, it will have traced the same arc as many movie genres — westerns, musicals, disaster movies — before it: popularity, leading to overexposure and decline in quality, culminating in audience neglect. It’s a story worth watching going forward . . . unlike most of 2023’s comic-book movies.