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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.
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.
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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