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‘The Marvels’ Meltdown: Disney MCU Seeing Lowest B.O. Opening Ever At $47M+ — What Went Wrong
It's even worse after factoring in double-digit inflation since 2021 or so. Disney, however, is the master of 'Hollywood accounting' and squeezing every drop of water from a franchise installment, such as licensing or merchandizes for years after the movie is discontinued from theatres. Also the "Disney‘s Marvel Cinematic Universe" is comprised of 24 movies. Some of these movies are expected to be underwhelming or loss-leaders and are not given an equal marketing push. It's assumed that Iron Man sequels will do better than stuff like "Ant-Man and the Wasp".
Richard Hanania blames gender pandering/wokeness, but it's worth noting that the 2017 Wonder Woman did well ($800+ million gross total , $100+ million open) despite obviously having a female lead. Also, having a pretty (by conventional Western standards) blonde lead does not also fit into the wokeness paradigm either.
It seems clear that it’s Marvel fatigue rather than wokeness or the casting. That doesn’t help, especially in some international markets like China (where the movie has also done poorly iirc), but it’s not the cause. After all, Black Panther and
MsCaptain Marvel both did very well.If I were Iger I’d be annihilating the upcoming Marvel slate right now and cancelling as much pre-production stuff as possible. The only MCU properties that can survive now are Holland’s Spider-Man and RDJ’s Iron Man, so Bob should probably call the latter up and ask how much it’s going to take to bring him back.
The more interesting question is what the next big Hollywood trend is going to be.
After how they ditched him for cost-cutting, Downey should ask for the moon on a stick. Depends whether or not he wants to go back to playing the part, of course. But I couldn't blame him for getting a little revenge in, if they do come back cap-in-hand to him.
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Not quite. There were extensive reshoots - and a lot of anti woke critics that I follow (specifically the critical drinker) note how surprisingly low woke the film is. So it may have been tone down since Bob Iger came back, but maybe it was just not possible with project already in motion.
Also Capitan Marvel was designated to be the feminist woke banner bearer.
From my understanding the problem with the movie is that it is just dull and weak.
From my own perspective, as someone rabidly anti woke and very ready to criticize “cape-shit” and every opportunity, it’s definitely not that.
Because all that being said, I absolutely adored the last two animated Sony Spider-Man movies, “Into the Spider-Verse” and “Across the Spider-Verse”.
We’re they “woke”? Oh absolutely, noticeably so.
But they were extremely high quality, clearly made with passion and drive, absolutely gorgeous, creative almost to a fault, stylish, full of interesting characters with tons of personality, compelling, and often hilarious.
I watched them both with my kids multiple times. No regrets.
And that "spiderman-but-black" shit didn't crawl up your ass and bite your spine hard enough? The animated spider things were fine but very much inspite of the diverse characters. Like the race swap with morales has always stunk to high heaven.
"Spiderman-but-black" debuted in 2011.
I had successfully managed to not care about their "x-but-black/woman" shit they have going on in the print comics.
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It did at first but but honestly Miles Morales is actually a pretty interesting character, very distinct from Peter Parker on multiple levels apart from the obvious skin tone.
Going in I suspected it would be another insipid, brainless race/gender swap to stick it to the legacy fandom, but I feel I was proven wrong. Despite the obvious and very cynical dei-style calculus at work, the character was interesting and somewhat inspired. At least compared to the vast majority of marvel-dom.
Honestly it’s nice to be proven wrong once in a while.
My young kids really enjoy the "spider friends" cartoon. Its basically young miles, young peter, and young gwen teaming up to fight bad guys.
It feels like a very traditional kids cartoon thing, where the worst thing the villains are trying to do is "ruin everyone's fun".
I feel like the spiderverse concept saved the spiderman franchise a bit. I liked the original spiderverse movie and miles simply because I've heard the peter storyline so many times.
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It may not be "woke" by today's standard, but if they dropped this in 2008 when the MCU was first coming out with Iron Man, people would have said this is super woke/SJW/progressive and be like wtf is this?
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I don't think that Black Panther would count as "woke-casted", which I'd associate with the sort of casting that seems to be intent on going through an Excel sheet of ethnicities to present whatever are considered to be the correct ratios at the moment. Almost all of the important cast consists of black actors, with Martin Freeman as the rather oddly-cast token whitey CIA agent.
Blacks are over-represented in most media and the only criticism is that it doesn't go further. The correct woke ratio is 100% black.
At the time of Black Panther coming out black people were hardly overrepresented as main characters in superhero movies.
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I’m not even sure that will stop the bleeding. I see the same things happening with most franchises— the problem isn’t woke (though I think it’s a symptom) it’s that the franchises have been essentially coasting of name-brand recognition and bizarre fan-service ideas rather than doing anything new, thought provoking, or interesting.
I can’t remember the last franchise show that I’ve genuinely been surprised by, or even thought about ten seconds after I stopped watching it. That’s not just Marvel, it’s any franchise TV series or movie. I follow Trek a bit more than Marvel, but even here it’s like they’re so insular that they don’t even realize just how silly the ideas are. It’s like they think if they throw the images of old characters on the screen, or crib notes from ten year old franchises that they’re going to attract people. The academy idea is pretty much literally “Harry Potter, but in the Star Trek universe,” Picard is basically “hey, look, it’s those character from other, better shows, reprising their old roles,” and both Discovery and Strange New Worlds are busy reintroducing Spock to Kirk because really, in an entire universe, with an entire galaxy, the best modern Hollywood has is “let’s imitate things that worked before, change nothing, say nothing, and cover it up with current thing”.
Do not get me started on what they did to Trek. I'll just note that even there, with Disco being all! original! girlboss!, they still had to bring back Pike, who was only briefly mentioned in original Trek, in order to have a character who was connected to canon and wasn't an unpleasant, self-righteous, pain in the backside.
Discovery could have been okay, if it hadn't been chock-full of (excuse the phrase) the woke agenda from the very start. It's like they set out to make a parody: the mushroom-obsessed Chief Engineer? Potty-mouth Ensign? "my name's Michael but I'm a girl ha ha see what we did there?" and the rest of it. Plus they went full Mirror Universe in the first season and you don't do a Mirror Universe episode until a couple seasons in, when your characters have been established and the audience is familiar with them.
They had Klingon Richard Spencer who was PURELY WHITE SKINNED for crying out loud. The only thing he didn't do was chant "the knife-ears will not replace us."
What Enterprise did to the Vulcans (now they're Space Fascists, Father?) pissed me off. Don't even talk to me about the idiot scriptwriters who made it canonical (because it's in a televised show, the bastards!) that Vulcans think Humans are literally stinky and have to wear nasal filters around us. I thought this was meant to be a not-very-funny in-series joke amongst Humans, but nope. It Troo. This, among other things (I was delighted when I heard Scott Bakula was cast as Archer because I think he's a good actor who can give sensitive performances, then they made Archer a well-balanced character by having a chip on both shoulders), make me nope the hell out of it. I've heard it got a lot better in later seasons, but by then it was too late, I was never coming back.
Then Discovery showed me that you can always go lower. I haven't watched any Trek since then, no matter how well-reviewed it's been, and I was a Trekkie since I was seven.
Picard is unwatchable except the last season is mildly ok. STD (lel) is a complete write off. Strange New Worlds is suprisingly not that bad, it's ok when it's not focosuing on uhura(actress can't fill those shoes not even one bit) or Nurse Chapel ( her character is she's an E-girl but in space wearing a medical uniform ). And don't get me started on Pike doing most of the captaining from his personal mess hall while he's cooking. Other than that it's not as rage inducing as it could have been. Honestly STD set the bar so low it formed a black hole in the middle of the earth and is slowly consuming the planet. Anything else in comparison to that is ecstatic.
Y'know, this makes me glad I haven't watched any of the new stuff. And I still think Chef Pike sounds better than "Start an interstellar incident because I couldn't keep my goddamn dog on a lead" Archer 😀
But why the hell are they always doing Chapel dirty? I know the original got saddled with an unrequited romance for Spock, but she was a scientific researcher in her own right who re-trained as a nurse so she could join Starfleet to search for her missing scientist fiancé. She wasn't an idiot or the punchline of a bad sex joke like reboot made her.
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TBH the knife ear bit would at least be sort of creative. Bad, but creative. I don’t even mind messages I disagree with, but I think especially in science fiction, you don’t beat people over the head with them, and you show rather than tell. My nanowromo is more subtle than professional Star Trek. That’s not a good thing.
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I think this is probably most of the issue: there have been lots of MCU movies and the universe as a whole has changed so much it's hard for people outside of the fandom to keep up. Someone watching Iron Man cold in 2008 saw a very familiar world with American weapons in Afghanistan being a major part of the plot. Someone watching anything after Endgame needs to know that half of everyone disappeared for a year or two. Lately I've been thinking it would have been better to have Endgame end in an even larger reset to a world more like our own: Marvel is trapped in a huge escalation loop where each villain of the week has to threaten even bigger than the one before. Either force the heroes into hiding (a la The Incredibles) after their final victory or somehow resolve the time travel to undo the whole thing, or some combination of the two: there's a chance for cameos of the familiar actors, but also re-telling the origin story of a new character playing a new take on a familiar hero.
Honestly, you can see some evidence they tried to go that way (trying to pass the mantle of Captain America in one of the TV shows, and the hammer of Thor), but it feels like they weren't willing to commit to the bit and either (1) tell a smaller-scoped origin story against smaller enemies and (2) commit to writing off familiar characters and starting over.
Although I did see an interesting take on the wokeness claim that the MCU has stopped or slowed showing shirtless male superheroes of late, which had been a fairly constant feature of the early movies. I don't get much out of male eye candy personally, so I'm not sure I had noticed its absence, or its effect on the other half of the potential audience. I will say that all the most recent heroes are almost visually uninteresting in matching full-body spandex suits, only differing in colors and patterns, which is perhaps related (and they all shoot beams of different colors of light).
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You mean Black Panther and Captain Marvel? Ms. Marvel was one of the least watched Disney+ shows. (which is a shame; the actress playing her is wonderfully charismatic)
It's possible that Captain Marvel is the important case to look at here, though. The audience decision during the Captain Marvel release was roughly "we're in the middle of the biggest cliffhanger in history; do we want to watch an extra 2 hour blockbuster movie that might be important to the epic resolution?" Obviously yes. The audience decision for The Marvels release is roughly "we're in the middle of a bit of a lull; do we want to subscribe to an extra streaming service and watch an extra 10 hours of direct-to-video shows that might be important to the blockbuster movie?" (Wanda Vision introduced the third one of The Marvels' protagonists) That's not so obvious a yes.
Yeah sorry I meant Captain Marvel, the one with the blonde woman.
No problem, that was confusing even in the comics continuity, and (if I'm remembering the Old Days right) in part because of feminism; why is the female superhero still being Ms. Marvel while the male superhero gets to be Captain Marvel? Since you couldn't have two Captain Marvels running around, she got promoted to being the Captain Marvel and he got killed off. The history is tangled since they kept swapping around "who is Captain Marvel now?"
Not that simple, of course, but it was part of it: keep the character as "female empowerment".
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I don't think there will be another trend. Two hour movies at the movie theater are now deprecated. They are increasingly irrelevant to the culture zeitgeist. My prediction is that there will never be another major popcorn movie franchise at the level of Star Wars, MCU, or Harry Potter. That time in history is now over.
In terms of general trends in video, then AI has to be the next frontier. I was just watching some prehistoric planet thing on Netflix narrated by Morgan Freeman. It seems like the technology is already available to replace a person with an AI generated voice. And it'd be a lot cheaper than Morgan Freeman.
It's seems like it might be movie/TV adaptations of other properties that are actually competently made.
There are some early successes here and if studios shift away from superheroes this might be the next thing. You both get the brand brand recognition of a pre-existing property and get around the "franchise fatigue" stuff. You also have a product line ready to sell stuff from. It works kind of like how anime works for the manga industry, it's often not really intended to make a big profit on it's own, it's marketing. You could even integrate the streaming services to directly sell stuff from the shows/movies.
I could easily see there being ten+ years until ai stuff really takes off in a transformative way for media production in such a way that these kinds of trends don't matter as much but until then this could fill the void.
I think honestly, the writing is 99% of the problem. The reason these franchises suck is that they’re badly written, have no actual thought behind them, and no characters that people actually care about. A simple test here. If the first thing you’d ever seen of your franchise were the most recent three entries, would you even care? It’s a quality problem. The stories are poorly constructed, poorly thought out, full of plot holes, and have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said.
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This does sound convincing. I remember as a child eagerly awaiting the release of "The Wizard", a glorified commercial for Super Mario 3. At the time, I would have also been happy to watch an actual 90 minute Super Mario 3 commercial.
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