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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.
The sequel came too late, Captain Marvel (female version) was too obscure a character, Brie Larson went around shooting her mouth off after the first movie and made it actively unpleasant to even contemplate watching, and when they finally released it, it had been downgraded from the sequel to Captain Marvel to "The Marvels" which was (1) a character you probably didn't like from the first movie (2) a character you probably didn't remember from the small parts she had in the other movies and (3) a teenybopper from a Disney+ TV show you may have watched. Or not.
The irony here is that the audience which is going seems to be predominantly men, but they've failed to get the Young Female Demographic they may have been going for. I haven't watched any of the Marvel movies in so long that I was honestly shocked to learn they had killed off Iron Man. An understandable move because the actor would be too expensive to cast in new movies (as well as aging out of the part), but a stupid move because the characters that comics fans know and want are Iron Man, Captain America, and so on.
Not "So she used to be Ms. Marvel, but when Captain Marvel became Shazam, now she's in his boots and Ms. Marvel is now a teenager and it's all different and worse".
Disney and Marvel Studios went one too many times to the well, and milked the cow dry (to mix my metaphors). The golden goose has stopped laying. They need to give it all a rest, then come back in a couple years and reboot with a new Iron Man (but please God don't update too much and make it bad). Find a halfway decent actor to replace Robert Downey, write a script that isn't "Rings of Power" level stupidity, and ditch the cheap costuming and awful CGI. If the movie looks cheap even though you spent the GDP of a minor European nation on it, nobody is going to like that.
I think the issue was a bit different:
My point being, the MCU could have been just fine without Iron Man and Captain America. They made those characters popular, so they could have done the same thing again—introduce some new characters to the film-going audience and make them compelling. The problem wasn't that they brought in unknown characters, it was that they didn't make those characters compelling.
[1] This is a tangent but re-watching this video reminded me of how when they switched from their old narrator (who does this video) to the new one, tons of people complained that the old one was better. Which was crazy to me? The "new" narrator (not really new at this point, he's been doing it for >10 years) sounds like an actual movie trailer narrator, the old one sounds like a guy who can do a decent impression of a movie trailer narrator.
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