Were they trying to keep the movie release a secret for a reason?
Seems like a lot of us had no idea it was coming out this weekend…
Writers strike and actors strike, meant that only minimal promotion was possible
studios should’ve caved faster
True
Wrong. It was absolutely possible. Just not possible while sacrificing absolutely everything for their profit-focused timeline. I want movies to be profitable, but most studies won’t accept anything lower than “wildly popular with opportunities for sequels and spinoffs”.
Right?
I have a few Capt Marvel fans in the house and if they’d invested in any kind of pre-release promotion I would probably have gotten release weekend tickets.
much less what its even about. pass.
Where I live there were ads everywhere and on tons on TV.
Maybe is a good time to go back and get good stories scripts and hire good directors.
That’s just putting a bandage on a bigger problem. They need to get rid of “the Marvel method”. Changing entire scripts in post production doesnt work anymore, Marvel isnt some small studio like in 2008.
I didn’t know they did that, it sounds pretty crazy. Almost amateurish tbh.
I saw it today. It was fine. It’s far from “the worst movie in the MCU” like some reviews I’ve seen. And I didn’t watch Ms. Marvel or Secret War, either. Still followed the story fine (I am a casual comics fan so I’m already vaguely familiar w/ Ms. Marvel and the Kree/Skrull war, in fairness).
Biggest contributor to the low B.O. in my opinion was the studios dragging out the writers & actors strikes and not being able to mount any publicity for the movie. I only remembered it was opening this weekend when I saw all the negative headlines about it coming out.
Are these newer movies really that much worse in general or has the audience just finally gotten tired of the entire MCU? I saw every single one up until the second Spider-Man flick and many of them were just sort of lame. Movies like Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel and Black Panther and the Ant-Man movies which all released in the MCU’s most dominant period leading up to and in between the Thanos movies were pretty bad and they still made a lot of bank.
I watched all those mid movies because I was invested in the shared continuity and wanted to see the different branches of the universe collide with each other. When they finally did, that investment just kind of dissipated, but I think the final nail in the coffin for me was when they announced the Disney+ Marvel shows at which point it just became too much of a time commitment to keep up with.
They’re bad. Multiverse of Madness was alright. The Spider-Man movies are pretty fun. Everything else since Endgame has been utter shit, though I will say the end of Loki season 2 gave Loki a great “out” as a character, despite being dumb for two seasons, and its a shame they’ll definitely not just let him go.
It just depends on the movie. A good superhero movie will still pull more money than anyone can spend in a lifetime.
All of the articles are about a movie that wasn’t promoted at all, and it’s the sequel to a movie that didn’t do good anyways. There’s zero surprise to anyone with a level head. It’s all clickbait rage bs.
I go to A LOT of movies. I have the AMC A List thing so I try to go every week. I have not seen a SINGLE trailer for The Marvels.
Strikes meant that this movie wasn’t going to get promoted well.
I was about to ask why airing trailers was against strikes but then it occurred to me that writers are probably still involved in trailers technically lol.
its a double edged sword, re: shows.
like on the one hand, i think if they had just done spin-offs, people could decide what they were into or not. but on the other hand, they NEED to have everything tied deeply together, or else no one but the actual die-hards would actually watch the shows.
like it was so frustrating watching the third Guardians movie (snuck into the theatre screening, didn’t pay for that shit), and literally was like ‘who the fuck is that?’ ‘i thought that person died’ ‘etc’. and it’s like… oh right, didn’t watch this or that season of this or that show, or special or whatever.
I only watched until iron man 3 but for me personally the military propaganda was always way too strong in these movies to get into them.
Adding TV shows into the mix that were average made it too much to bother keeping up, and I haven’t watched MCU since then.
Right? Like I’m not against going to the movies for a MCU show. But it just feels like I have to do homework to catch up before I can do so.
So a couple of points…
Marvel has really felt like it’s lost it’s vision since Endgame. Everything from Iron Man forward had been building to that point and once they hit it, it’s like they forgot what they were doing.
The current big bad didn’t get introduced until Loki, a Disney+ show, and if you look at the properties:
Endgame - 4/26/2019
Spider-Man: Far From Home - 7/2/2019
Wandavision - 1/15/21
Falcon and Winter Soldier - 3/19/21
Loki - 6/9/21That’s a full 2 year gap and three properties before anyone gets a sense of where the next phase is going. Then:
Black Widow - 7/9/21 (unrelated flashback)
What If? - 8/11/21 (unrelated)
Shang Chi - 9/3/21 (unrelated)
Eternals - 11/5/21 (unrelated)
Hawkeye - 11/24/21 (unrelated)
Spider-Man: No Way Home - 12/17/21Using Spider-Man to crack open the multiverse first announced in Loki 6 months previously was a good idea, but there was no mention of Kang or what threat he represented. There were also FIVE unrelated properties between Loki and Spider-Man making it easy to forget Kang was even a thing, assuming people even caught the Disney+ show in the first place.
Moon Knight - 3/30/22 (unrelated)
Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness - 5/6/2022A direct follow on what was done with Spider-Man, 5 months later, again, no reference to Kang.
Ms. Marvel - 6/8/22 (unrelated)
Thor: Love and Thunder - 7/8/22 (unrelated)
She-Hulk - 8/18/22 (unrelated)
Werewolf By Night - 10/7/22 (unrelated)
Wakanda Forever - 11/11/22 (unrelated)
Guardians Holiday Special - 11/25/22 (unrelated)Phase 5:
Quantumania - 2/17/23First film in Phase 5 makes it clear (finally) that Kang is the next big bad, almost 2 years after the character was introduced in a TV show, but it’s not the years that were the problem…
It was the hours of unrelated content spread across 11 movies and TV shows, 14 if you count What If, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange hitting the multiverse angle but failing to mention Kang.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 - 5/5/23 (unrelated)
Secret Invasion - 6/21/23 (unrelated)
Loki Season 2 - 10/5/23
Marvels - 11/10/23 (unrelated)And here we are…
I haven’t actually seen Marvels yet, so I don’t know how it fits in to the overall plot.Alternate universe hole. No Kang. I’ve heard rumors of an X-Men stinger similar to what they did with Xavier and Reed Richards in Doctor Strange.2 and a half years of churning out unrelated properties after having three phases of tightly integrated continuity is NOT how you keep your existing audience.
So all of that being point 1.
Point 2 is this… In the comics nobody really cared about Carol Danvers. She didn’t become interesting until the modern Captain Marvel reboot in 2012. In fact, they replaced her a couple of times. Before that, her major story arc was getting her powers stolen by Rogue who would later join the X-Men using both her own power stealing mutant abilities and Carol’s flight, invulnerability and super strength.
I’m sure it has nothing at all to do with them being shit movies.
Some of them were worse than others (cough, Eternals, cough). But Shang Chi was fine. Wakanda Forever was in a tough spot since Boseman died, but it was fine.
The plot of Wakanda Forever was pretty sus too, though, African black folks vs indigenous South American folks (sure they live underwater, and except for Namora their skin is not a standard human hue, but like, still)
It was still a good movie
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I think the problem is not that they didn’t have a clear direction for the big bad (look back at the Infinity Saga, Thanos is barely spelled out and there is very little overarching continuity towards leading up to IW/EG) I think the problem is that most of what you listed are just mediocre to not good. Out of all of those, I would probably only count the following as being good to great:
- Spider-Man: Far From Home
- Wandavision
- Loki (both seasons)
- Shang Chi
- Spider-Man: No Way Home
- Werewolf By Night
- Ms. Marvel (on this one, I might even be fudging a little just because I love Iman in the role)
- Guardians of the Galaxy 3
- Marvels*
Out of roughly 22 on the list there, that’s a just impressively bad hit rate. Not everything I left off of my list is “bad” per se, but it’s mostly just mediocre and I have about a zero percent chance of rewatching it (Falcon, Ant-Man 3, MoonKnight, Dr Strange, Wakanda, etc.) compared to the Infinity Saga, where I’ve seen just about everything multiple times. And then there is the problem that quite a lot of it is bad (Eternals, Thor, Secret Invasion…) I think doing this much TV really hurt them as quite a lot of the TV properties were poorly thought out and didn’t have 6 hours worth of good story.
I don’t think that the idea that having all of the tie-ins really hurt them as much as the perception that all of the tie-ins were required watching hurt them. For example, The Marvels you can totally go in without having watched either of the TV properties, or probably even Captain Marvel. The movie guides you through what you need to know, which is very little, but that is a theme on basically any comment page or article when you talk about the film’s box office draw. I mean, we’re not talking about Breaking Bad or the good seasons of Game of Thrones where if you didn’t watch from the beginning you’re going to miss big moments.
and re: your point 2, this is also the case for the MCU Carol. The movie was among the worst in the IS, and while Brie Larsen is a fantastic actress, we’re several outings in before you can even kinda care about Carol in the Marvels. Ironically, I counted this as a plus for the movie when I was telling my buddy if he should go see it. I saw Endgame opening night, and the audience was right there for all of the big moments, which you can tell they intended Carol’s destruction of the ships to be, and while it wasn’t quite crickets, you could tell that didn’t hit the way they wanted it to. Even this movie, I went to see in spite of it being a CM movie if anything.
* This one might be recency bias or maybe just that the MCU has been so disappointing that I’m grading on a curve a bit, but I would give this one a solid 3/5.
I think instead of “bad”, I would just call them “filler”.
Moon Knight was very good, but it does nothing to move forward the overall story of multiverses and Kang.
Yeah, that’s probably fair, or at least close to what I was getting at. Personally, I could give a shit if they do some stuff that has no major bearing on the overall story, but I personally found it to be basically filler material still. It’s fine.
Like I know it’s unlikely, but I would not mind at all if for example the next Spider-Man has almost no connection to the overall MCU given where they’re at in the story, as long as it’s good.
I think if the movies and shows were better, no one would mind the lack of direction. I didn’t see anyone complaining about “the big picture” with WandaVision or even Falcon & The Winter Soldier (which I’m seeing people souring over now but I kinda liked it, despite its ill-advised Israel vs. Palestine analogous plotline). No one complained about it with Black Widow, Shang Chi, or Hawkeye either.
It’s where the movies include Kang or the Multiverse but rules are different or there’s no sense of progress on Kang’s part like we saw with Thanos, where the real Multiverse Saga problem exists.
I’m a fan of Alan Moore’s comments on superhero media’s relation to fascism. Quoted bit below:
And he now looks with dismay on the way the superhero genre in which he once worked has eaten the culture. “Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys – of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing.
The relevant bit in bold:
He thinks that’s not just infantile but dangerous. “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” He points out that when Trump was elected in 2016, and “when we ourselves took a bit of a strange detour in our politics”, many of the biggest films were superhero movies.
Isn’t $47 million dollars for one weekend pretty good? What did they spend to make the movie?
Everything costs over 100M these days and usually much, much more. I heard someone say The Marvels was $250M
274.8 million. the 4th highest marvel budget LOL
Fucking, wow.
Great my fucking YouTube feed is gonna be drowning in so many “go woke go broke” posts from now til the end of goddamn time thanks Disney you fucks.
At this point they’re doing this shit on purpose to get more people voting red so they won’t ever pay taxes again ever.
It has higher user score than critics score on RT, so at least they cannot complain about biased journalists.
Good. Less marvel movies, the better.
Record Marvel B.O.
I’ll take that $47M if they don’t want it
Garbage franchise finally suffering, good. This shit needs to die. Endless seas of trash.
I don’t even want to go see a good Marvel movie in the theater. I’m certainly not going to go watch some mid bs.
Last time I did it was for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and honesrly, I’ve seen Everything Everywhere all At Once before that and I was shocked how lame Dr Strange wad in comparison with the idea of the multiverse.
One of those two is an indie movie, the other one a blockbuster. Really shouldn’t shock people that blockbusters are lazy.
I’m not sure what your point is since the multiverse is based on comics that came out way before Everything.
Being based on something means nothing. They don’t take a comic book to set to film, they write a script.
great. hope it sticks until the CiNeMaTiC uNiVeRsE is a thing of the past.
