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”.
much less what its even about. pass.
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.
Where I live there were ads everywhere and on tons on TV.
I haven’t watched broadcast or cable TV in over a decade.
All the MCU marketing I’ve gotten has been through hype, and after dozens of films the hype just isn’t there anymore.
Though I think what really killed it for me was the Disney Plus shows. It started to feel like homework just to watch Marvel stuff.
Yeah, I watch basketball, so I see tons of movie ads still.
And agreed, I’ve given up on MCU shows and Disney+
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.
Ms. Marvel was pretty good. The villains were entirely forgettable, and some of the CG was phoned in. But the heart of the show, the main characters, and the humanity of it were all pretty good.
The villains were entirely forgettable
As most of the Marvel villains, sadly.
Ego, Killmonger, Blonsky, Loki, Thanos, Klau, Grandmaster, Zemo, they’ve had some great roles and better actors. They’ve had as many wasted opportunities as home runs, but I wouldn’t say “most.”
Yeah I really loved Ms Marvel but damn the ending was rushed.
Just like every marvel show the ending was rushed. That’s the only thing it suffered from.
Ms. Marvel was fine, but it was, basically, a Nickelodeon kids show and most adults aren’t going to want to sit through that.
I get what you’re saying, but there have been some excellent Nickelodeon kids shows.
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.
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 don’t understand that to begin with. They tout the whole “connected universe” angle but then if you look even slightly behind the curtain it’s obvious there’s nobody overseeing the lore between projects. Not when one is beginning while another is undergoing reshoots and rewrites. It’s not possible and it shows, just like how Tiamut has been sticking out of the ground in universe for like 2 years and all we’ve gotten is a joke reference in She-Hulk lmao.
I didn’t know they did that, it sounds pretty crazy. Almost amateurish tbh.
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.
I honestly believe Captain Marvel was the start of the downfall of Marvel. Not because of the cast, sex, or anything along those lines.
I believe they over did the character. They made her way to damn strong which made all the other characters pointless.
Remember when a literal god, the most advanced mech, and the super soldier with all the stats struggled with Thanos? Then Cpt Marvel swoops in destroys a couple of ships and takes one on the chin like nothing, that was the moment. The first movie benefitted from a month release from Endgame. Everyone thought it would have something major in it.
The movie wasn’t horrible, it followed most of the other mediocre movies. Origin story where we meet a villain that we will never see again and some powers we will never see again. The acting and the cast were good but it was just ok.
I honestly believe Captain Marvel was the start of the downfall of Marvel. Not because of the cast, sex, or anything along those lines. I believe they over did the character. They made her way to damn strong which made all the other characters pointless. Remember when a literal god, the most advanced mech, and the super soldier with all the stats struggled with Thanos? Then Cpt Marvel swoops in destroys a couple of ships and takes one on the chin like nothing, that was the moment.
I don’t understand this criticism at all.
First of all, it was Wanda who had Thanos almost beaten, which is why he had his ship fire on the ground. So Wanda presented a greater threat to him than Captain Marvel did; so great a threat that he was willing to sacrifice his entire army to try to take her out. I think it was Feige who said, around the time of Endgame or maybe shortly thereafter, that Wanda was the most powerful character in the MCU. But people don’t criticise Wanda for being overpowered and making all the other characters pointless.
Second of all, while Danvers did take down one ship (not two, not that it makes a difference), they could have found ways for several other characters to do the same (eg Doctor Strange via illusions, Wanda or Thor through sheer power, Iron Man through nanotech magic) - they just wanted Captain Marvel to make a big entrance because she had been teased at the end of Infinity War (and then also in her own movie prior to Endgame), and we hadn’t really seen her manifest her full power earlier in Endgame.
But the whole point of that her late intervention in the final fight was that Captain Marvel was NOT the overpowered deus ex machina that many fans falsely deride her to be. Because in a one-on-one fight with Thanos, Thanos disposes of her easily - they trade a few punches, he throws her into the ground. She comes back, and he punches her out of frame and out of the film (until the epilogue). The final fight came down to Captain America, Thor and of course Iron Man, which it was always going to - those being the three keystone Avengers of the MCU.
That’s also why all the founding members of the Avengers went unsnapped at the end of Infinity War. Markus and McFeely and the Russos knew they were making an Avengers movie, not a Captain Marvel movie. Markus and McFeely knew that fans would have felt rightfully betrayed if a character, who had only been introduced to the MCU a year or so before, had swooped in and saved the day after a decade-long build up. So they made sure she didn’t. But more fool them - they still cop the same criticism.
And I say all this as someone who thinks that both Captain Marvel movies (and most of Larson’s performances in the MCU) have been decidedly mediocre, though not for any reasons related to her power level.
Wanda wasn’t an issue because we seen her grow overtime with her power. She started off with simple tricks then demolished a large number of enemies when her brother died then showed she could hold her own against Thanos. That was a character with growth.
Cpt Marvel never showed growth. It was overpowered from the get go. They showed her overpower Thanos as well until he blasted her into the next scene.
But you bring up a great point, the Wanda/ Cpt Marvel sequence was a massive middle finger to anyone that wanted something great from a decade of world building. The whole female sequence was a “hey, we have strong… females too, but we don’t give a shit about them.” Most of the female characters are a joke because either they are overpowered or underpowered. Wanda is the best flushed out one. All the others are a " we had to hire them" vibe. I always believed they should have divided up the characters into different worlds for better stories.
“The final fight came down to … It was always going to be”
But there was no reason too. The problem wasn’t that they created an overpowered character who saved the day, it’s that they created an overpowered character who couldn’t save the day because the weaker popular characters had to.
There is zero consistency in powerscaling even scene-to-scene within a single movie. I appreciate a good galaxybrain take but I think you aren’t correct here.
Remember Strange participating in a ~5 v 1 vs Thanos and losing before going one on one and almost drawing? Absolute “conservation of ninjutsu” shit. That’s without even considering the fundamental brokenness of the Time Stone, which he never properly uses in Infinity War, but Thanos actually does use it somewhat properly to basically negate a third of the movie.
I saw the movie with my kids and they really enjoyed, but I completely agree with you on all points. I stay up with all MCU releases because I enjoy them, but Captain Marvel has the same problem DC has with Superman: they’re virtually invincible. There’s no real physical struggle and therefore the fights are just eye candy with nothing really on the line.
So now the writers have to figure out how to make them vulnerable and it’s always personal moral conflict or relationship challenges. Those can work if the writing is actually deep and developed, but not when the core expectation from audience is action and explosions. There’s just not the time to develop the story.
They should go watch One Punch Man to understand how to make these characters work.
Agreed. One of the tropes I like in OPM is that he’s never called to any of the fights and only shows up for the final fight. Until then all of his friends and colleagues are fighting for their lives. They kind of did that a little with Endgame, which was a really badass moment for Captain Marvel imo.
Maybe they could go more towards the other trope of being so powerful they’re bored, but that would be quite a bit against the grain for Captain Marvel’s character.
I think in general audiences are just bored with the all powerful, strong moral backbone super hero. That’s why OPM, The Boys, and Invincible are popular.
100% agree. When you have to create a new character to kill your op character, that’s just bad writing.
To build on this now we also have a Super Skrull with capt Marvel’s powers and those of a several other superheros/villains.
(Or was I the only one able to make it through Secret Invasion?)
Also, I never watched the Ms. Marvel show, so I have absolutely no opinion or frame of reference for that now supposedly marquee character so I’m just not all that drawn to watching it. Plus… super hero fatigue
Pretty sure you and maybe one other person made it through secret invasion.
Ms. Marvel was fine but it felt like a Disney XD show and not part of the MCU of the last decade. I’m still fine with that. You need younger people to watch and not just older ones. Fox did a lot of ahit wrong but the one thing that was great was Logan. It dealt with serious shit and was more realistic. Not like Deadpool which was dick and fart jokes with violence.
I would still love a dark marvel. More realistic and violent with serious stories. A light marvel for younger kids and families. Last an Average marvel, the big over the top combination where nothing really matters.
Ms. Marvel was good, you should give it a go if you have the chance. I agree it felt a little …how do I put this…for the kids(?)…but it’s heart was absolutely in the right place and it made this straight old white guy feel things, which is always the mark of a good story in my humble opinion.
Personally I was done at the scene in winter soldier where Nick Fury digs a tunnel and gets away in a cut away that takes less than a second. The movie then expected me to take it seriously after it used the narrative get out of a looney toons cartoon
Can’t wait for the neckbeards to blame the show being about de wimmens as the cause rather than increasingly nonsensical oversaturation
literally my dipshit friend’s Letterboxd was ‘straight guys enjoy something not about them challenge: impossible’ and I just had to roll my eyes. I don’t take his opinions on movies seriously (besides a tiny niche).
goe wok go brork
de wimmens lmfao
@neme I remember the advertising for The Marvels was pretty bad. You had commercials that felt like advertisements for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general. One ad I got was like “Remember when Tony Stark built his first suit and became Iron Man? The Marvels, in theaters this November”
I think I saw one trailer months ago that I looked up on YouTube. I’m pretty sure I never saw an actual ad for it. The first I heard it was out this weekend is articles like this. Doesn’t that lack of advertising usually mean the studio has already written it off?
Where I live I was inundated with Marvels advertising, it’s been everywhere.
Haven’t seen the new movie. Even though it was panned I liked the first.
The biggest issue is just Marvel OVERLOAD in general, people are finally starting to get tired of it.
We’ve had so much Marvel for so long. People are just losing interest in general.
The movies have also significantly declined in terms of quality as well. I’m still not convinced super hero fatigue, or something similar, is actually a thing. If you start serving up crap people stop coming.
No. I wish people would stop repeating this marvel overload/fatigue idea - I’m not convinced it’s a thing respectfully. The truth is, lately Disney has been pumping out a lot of mediocre content. A good story is a good story, period. This movie was not really good, and it required someone to have watched a bunch of other not-great Disney+ shows.
Marvel has sooo many good stories and content they can dig up from their comics, but ultimately the business side of picking the content and shaping it for maximum profitability is sort of where shit gets weird. One theory is little kids want to go to the movies and make the parent bring them, so the movies are produced (catered) with that goal in mind.
Rather than marvel/superhero fatigue, I think it’s more of Disney dropping the ball (like they did with the star wars movies, inb4 they made billions, we all know the movies sucked).
Post infinity war, my opinion is This entire parallel worlds/timelines/dimensions storyline is a bit confusing on what exactly the endgame plan is
It is absolutely true for me, and the people saying it aren’t making it up.
You hear it so often because those people believe it. And there are a lot of people saying it.
I know you’re a super fan that wants ALL your stories. But you don’t make up the movie watching population.
Nah if it was good content people wouldn’t care. If it was truly “superhero fatigue” Invincible wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it is. It came out in a post-Endgame world and is one of the biggest shows on television.
People will clearly happily still watch super hero content, IF it’s good.
Everyone has different thresholds I imagine, I got tired of the marvel universe after iron man 2 personally.
The issue I think is the crossovers. This movie requires you to have seen Captain Marvel, Wanda vision and miss marvel. They need to go back to making movies of a single character and doing a crossover movie every once in a while. I love the MCU but I’m already skipping movies and shows, so I don’t wanna watch a movie and not have any idea who the characters in seeing are
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good. Less marvel movies, the better.
I wouldn’t personally say that it has anything to do with fatigue or oversaturation. I think the reality of it is that the majority of these movies have no heart, feeling, or direction. The obvious counter example to this trend is the Guardians of the Galaxy films, all of which are dripping with heart and are obviously thoughtfully crafted, and are all around good moving despite being in the MCU. If this universe of films were all given the same amount of care and thought as those films, I think they would all be successful. But alas, capitalism.
I think the fatigue is a product of the fact they have no heart or feeling
irony is fun and all but ultimately people want sincerity. Irony and wit are like icing people like them but there has to be something more substantial there or you just walk away feeling unsatisfied and slightly sick
Terry Pratchett’s work is a good example of how this can work he’s very ironic and uses a lot of witicisms but underneath it all there is a clear depth of feeling and the books are also full of profound and sincere statements and moments
My buddy always summed these movies up as cheeseburgers. Everyone loves a cheeseburger but no one really wants one at every meal.
I’ll take that $47M if they don’t want it
Isn’t $47 million dollars for one weekend pretty good? What did they spend to make the movie?
Apparently it cost $274 million.
How did they manage to spend that much lol. The whole LOTR trilogy cost $300m and even adjusting for 25 years of inflation I don’t think that price makes any sense.
Trying to mask boring characters and stories with expensive CGI, compensating for lack of fan enthusiasm and word of mouth with big marketing campaigns.
Cgi I’m guessing.
Yep it’s largely the increased amounts of cutting edge visual effects which require a LOT of man hours and the unnecessary amounts of pixel-fucking that producers and directors are allowed to get away with all the way up to (and sometimes after!) release.
The irony being that it’s somewhat common for VFX companies to go bankrupt
Adjusted for inflation, the budget for the trilogy would be around $450 million, which still doesn’t seem to bad considering the scale of it.
450 million dollar spread over 10,5 hours of film. That’s about 64 million dollar per regular film length (90 mins), which is a very tight budget for a filmof that size in a complex universe like that.
M$/film is a weird metric, but it works.
Way more than 10.5 hours. The full extended edition is 12 hours long, and in the commentary PJ kept hinting at an even longer 25th anniversary edition where they’ll add in even more deleted scenes.
I think it helped that none of the cast were huge stars at the time.
The $274 million are only production cost including reshoots, which happen because Marvel keeps rewriting the script once filming and sometimes even pospro has begun. It’s closer to $550 million, once you add marketing cost, so it needs to make half a billion to break even.
That’s insane.
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.
Or, realize that after 33 films, we have superhero-fatigue.
Hmm, almost every story type has been done to cliche. Having a superhero flavor makes no difference, at least to me. I don’t know much about the hero so I don’t have much interest in this instance.
I don’t think so, I just think these movies have largely not been very good. Like, I really liked Loki S2, have rewatched NWH a hundred times, I liked the Marvels, etc. The problem isn’t superheroes, you can use that as a backdrop for just about any type of story you want to tell and it can be great. For example, WandaVision tells a very different kind of story than anything else and it was really good. But of course, Marvel decides (I’m guessing late into post-production) they’re going to fuck up all of that character development in a post-credits scene and then ignore it entirely in the next movie.
I think they’re going to have to get a lot more creative about what types of stories they want to tell and what themes they want to get after and stop making them feel like cookie cutter properties. The early phases I think managed this a little better. Like, I remember walking out of TWS and thinking “damn, that was a really good Bond film with a Captain America skin on it” which is a compliment. Somewhere in there the whole thing got really generic.
I’d love a second Batman movie, or a good Green Lantern one etc. Couldn’t care less for this one
A second Batman movie?
And NOW you are telling me???
I think it’s obvious what I mean though…
Having grown up with the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher Batman movies and having enjoyed the Dark Knight trilogy, no, I honestly do not know what ‘a second Batman movie’ is supposed to mean. But admittedly I also haven’t really kept a close eye on what DC and MCU have been up to the past few years.
I mean the extremely popular and successful Batman (2022) movie with Pattinson
Thanks, I actually managed to completely miss that one. 😅
Personally I loved it. Much different to the Dark Knight trilogy, closer to the comics, pretty dark. Check it out sometime
