I respectfully disagree. MoM getting to 940M without China and Russia is not a underperformance. Could it have done more? Yes but sometimes movies don´t live up to the hype. It´s still made almost 250M more than the first one that had China. Love and Thunder made more than Ragnarok when you factor in no China and Russia. The only movie that had a sizeable drop was Wakanda Forever, which was also expected but granted it was bigger then I thought it would be. The MCU is fine. Ant-Man will do fine, GotG vol 3 will do fine. Same with The Marvels. I feel like there´s an expectation for MCU movies to always overperform like they did in Phase 3. Thing were always going to go down after Endgame to some degree. What we are seeing now in my opinion is the MCU stabilizing after the infinity saga. Also NWH is a MCU movie. To not give the MCU credit for that when the MCU people was making the decisions with Sony behind the scenes about bringing does characters back is unfair.
Also about the article there´s no lesson for Hollywood to take here about Avatar´s success. Nobody can even get close to replicate what Cameron does. There is a reason he has 3 2B+ movies. Nobody does it like him. There´s nothing to learn because no one can do blockbuster like Cameron. He knows what gets butts in the seats. Blockbuster king