While once the industry norm, since the 2010s, Hollywood has notably shifted away from mid-budget productions, at least on the mainstream level, making big-budget productions their priority. And the root cause for it can be tied to the superhero industry, especially the MCU, which had a stranglehold at the box office with nearly all of its productions in the last decade.

However, the genre that suffered the utmost consequences following the rise of superhero productions was comedies, which led Zooey Deschanel to believe her career was dead as a result.

Zooey Deschanel’s Career Took a Big Hit Following the Rise of Superhero Movies

Zooey Deschanel | Credit: Wikimedia Commons
While TV comedies are still good, and there have been some superb mainstream comedies in the past few years, their numbers have drastically decreased since the 2010s. One of the victims of this industry practice was Zooey Deschanel, notable for playing deadpan roles in beloved comedies throughout the 2000s, including the likes of Yes Man and Elf.

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But following the rise of superhero movies, and the industry’s refusal to invest more in comedies and Indies, Deschanel’s career hit a roadblock, which led her to believe her career might be over.
Zooey Deschanel in Elf | New Line Cinema
She told Lewis Howes:

“I was doing Indie movies my whole 20s and was successful at that, and doing then like some bigger comedies and stuff like that. And all of a sudden, around the end of my 20s, a bunch of the studios cut their slates like majorly, so they like cut out those, like comedy kind of movies that they would do… the stuff that I did, all got cut. And they were making superhero movies only, and that’s cool, I like superhero movies but that’s not the only thing I like… and so I was like, ‘Is this the end?’”

Fortunately, this wasn’t the end, as despite not landing any major works for a while, which resulted in her spending a whole year just doing music tours, Fox’s New Girl put Deschanel back on the map.

Zooey Deschanel Almost Made Her Superhero Debut in The Avengers

Although superhero flicks did hurt the actor’s bread and butter by making mainstream mid-budget films almost obsolete, Zooey Deschanel holds no grudge against them. And interestingly, she was initially supposed to play the main antagonist in 2012’s The Avengers.

Per The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Via CBR), Joss Whedon wanted to star the Elf Star as Wasp. However, her character was eventually cut from the later drafts of the script, as it took a considerable chunk of time away from the main heroes.

“It was all about The Wasp. He wanted to cast Zooey Deschanel. [Wasp] was the funniest character in the whole movie, and well-written.”

With 2023 being a great year for original releases and American Fiction director Cord Jefferson urging Hollywood to bring back mid-budget releases this Oscar, we might be in for a good future.