Things are looking grimmer and grimmer by the day for “The Marvels.” Last week I had reported that, based on internal tracking, I was seeing a $45-$50M opening for the latest MCU installment.
I wouldn’t even blame superhero burnout because stuff like Invincible and The Boys are really, really good. A good chunk of all the DC animated stuff is great too, and consistently released throughout the year.
Marvel on the other hand is just a factory now, and we’re all bored with the same product over and over again. Massive CGI setpieces with a story built around the action because it takes longer to animate than to write. Action used to facilitate a part of storytelling and now it’s just a big, yet incredibly important clusterfuck.
I kind of guessed when they started getting overly cosmic that shit was going to go sideways. The cosmic stuff is just insane in scope and scale.
we’re all bored with the same product over and over again.
Obviously with the success of the franchise I am in the minority with this belief, but from a critical standpoint 80% of the MCU films are “okay” and just popcorn flicks. There’s nothing wrong with that, but now that has caught up with the viewers and Disney.
Infinity War was special because the good guys actually lost and that alone shook things up for once. Endgame was special because it was the culmination of 10 years of filmmaking and a downright spectacle. Once you drill in beyond those, there are only a few standouts: Winter Soldier, Civil War, Iron Man 1 and Age of Ultron are all standouts in my opinion due to their themes: “what really defines the good guys?”
There are a few others I enjoyed but they had problems: In Homecoming, Feige really screwed up a lot about what makes Peter Parker likeable. Ragnarok was fun but in retrospect it is dragged down in quality by the major screw ups of its successor and its refusal to take much seriously. The misfits of GotG were fun too but ultimately its success really messed up the tone of the entire franchise. None of those 3 really jump out as memorable long-term, either - just fun. The rest are forgettable and almost cookie cutter copies of each other.
Possibly worse opening than the Eternals in the article - I literally forgot The Eternals existed lol. And I actually forgot about The Marvels movie.
so so terrible bad, zero redeeming qualities
The problem is all the movies require like 10 seasons of shows to understand now because it’s more profitable to stretch out a movie runtime over 6-10 weeks for a D+ series than it is to just make a standalone movie, even if that’s what the original intention was (looking at you Obi-Wan).
I used to love expansive, interconnected universes, and I still love Star Trek, but the MCU is so vast now that they’ve started including all the cosmic nonsense that it’s almost just too much to keep up with unless that’s the only franchise you’re consistently consuming.
Nobody in his right mind expected it to make a morbillion.
They’re not lifting the review embargo until 2 days before release. Considering this phase in general has been more miss than hit and that the original Captain Marvel was just ok, it’s no surprise that no one’s excited for it.
