ANDOR Creator Tony Gilroy Has a Blunt Take on Why Marvel Movies Are Struggling

Andor creator Tony Gilroy was recently asked about the decline in Marvel’s cinematic momentum. In a candid interview with /Film, Gilroy didn’t hold back when pointing out what he sees as a core issue with the MCU’s storytelling… repetition.

Gilroy, who’s been widely praised for hius work on Andor and grounding the story in complex, character-driven drama, shared this thought while reflecting on how he reshaped the Star Wars spinoff’s original scripts. Midway through the conversation, he drew a blunt comparison to Marvel’s approach:

“Trying to get the, what do they call it? I can’t remember the name of the box. What the f— is the name of the box in The Avengers? What the f— are they going for?”

When the interviewer reminded him it was the Tesseract, Gilroy continued:

“The Tesseract! That’s why all those Marvel movies are all — that’s why they fail. You’re just constantly … if that’s all you’re doing, then all you’re doing is just trying to get the Tesseract.”

He’s not wrong in pointing out that many Marvel entries fall into a pattern… glowing object, world-ending stakes, final battle, repeat. It’s a criticism that’s grown louder as the box office returns for the MCU have started to shrink and superhero fatigue has become part of the discussion.

Gilroy’s comments were part of a larger point about why Andor was built the way it was. The original drafts of the series reportedly followed a more episodic structure, with Cassian Andor and fan-favorite droid K-2SO hopping from adventure to adventure. But Gilroy scrapped that concept entirely.

“That’s something I always intended,” he said of delaying K-2SO’s introduction. Even though the earlier versions were “slick” and “interesting,” he said they had a major issue:

“It seemed to me, which is if that’s your show, that we’re going to storm the Citadel in the pilot, what are you going to do in episode 9? What do you do?”

In Gilroy’s view, if a story starts at full volume, there’s nowhere left to go.

Andor plays the slow burn long game. It builds tension. It spends real time with characters, showing how oppression, rebellion, and sacrifice actually unfold, not just as a setup for a climactic action-packed finale, but as the very heart of the show.

Gilroy’s comments are sure to reignite conversations around the current state of the MCU and whether it can evolve beyond the formula it perfected over the past decade. I feel like Thunderbolts* is the first Marvel film in a long time that effectively tried to do something different.

What do you think about Gilroy’s comments?