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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.
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.
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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