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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’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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