'The Marvels' is not just Marvel's mess
The latest MCU installment showcases everything wrong with not just Marvel, but Hollywood franchise filmmaking today.
This post contains spoilers for “The Marvels,” but who really cares
Here’s a sentence that seemed unthinkable a few years ago: the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is a mega flop.
“The Marvels,” the 33rd installment in the biggest movie franchise of all time, debuted in theaters last weekend with $47 million, the lowest opening for an MCU movie yet. This weekend, it dropped a whopping 78 % with $10 million, by far the biggest second-weekend dip for a Marvel movie.
The “Marvels” box office is glaring considering “Captain Marvel” earned over $150 million in the US over its opening weekend in 2019, and went on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide. A lot of it probably has to do with how the MCU has evolved since “Avengers: Endgame,” notably that there hasn’t been an “Avengers”-style event movie since then, despite there being 11 movies in that time. “Captain Marvel” was sandwiched between “Infinity War” and “Endgame,” and the character was positioned to be the key to defeating Thanos; whether Marvel Studios ever explicitly promised that doesn’t really matter — that’s how the public perceived it. Then she was almost a non-factor in “Endgame,” being entirely absent from the second act. Four years later, there isn’t quite that kind of anticipation, even though Disney desperately, and hilariously, tried to drum it up with a last-minute marketing push that reminded fans of previous characters and movies that had nothing to do with this one, as seen below.
But the “Marvels” misfire is also the culmination of a post-“Endgame” decline in quality for the franchise and a slew of negative press, including criticism of shoddy and rushed visual effects and troubling allegations against actor Jonathan Majors, who Marvel had positioned as its next Thanos-like “big bad.”
So, “The Marvels” mess didn’t come out of nowhere; even in July of last year, I wrote for my previous publication that cracks in Marvel’s armor were beginning to show after lukewarm receptions for movies like “Eternals” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.”
But is “The Marvels” getting unfairly punished for Marvel’s recent sins? It’s hard to say, but it is certainly not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination. It continues the trend of noticeably bad, or just plain lazy, graphics, where entire scenes take place in bland locations; the opening sequence is set on a random CGI rock, another in a random CGI field, and another in a random CGI New York City park. And to cap it off, a major X-Men character, Beast, makes their grand MCU debut in the mid-credits scene. What’s supposed to be a big deal is overshadowed by distractingly terrible VFX; Kelsey Grammer supposedly reprises his Beast role from 2006’s “X-Men: The Last Stand,” but it looks more like Marvel asked an artificial intelligence to barf out a version of the character.
Plot wise, the movie offers little justification for why it exists, beyond a standout performance from Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel, who deserves her own movie but will sadly probably never get one after “The Marvels” crashes and burns. Vellani gives the movie some much-needed charm, and there are some fun action sequences that showcase the movie’s power-switching, but they can’t save it from an incoherent story, an uninteresting main character in Carol Danvers, and a sense that something got lost in the editing room (why is Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury in this movie, other than to make wisecracks?). On top of that, 20ish minutes of the 105 minute runtime is dedicated to a planet where its citizens’ language is SONG, straight out of a Disney musical.
The bottom line is that “The Marvels” exemplifies most of what is wrong with the MCU right now, and it has the unfortunate timing of being released when most people seem to be over it. After dozens of movies and TV episodes since “Endgame,” the MCU has finally stretched itself too thin and asked too much of its audience; as hard as “The Marvels” tries to gloss over it, you still need to have seen two TV shows in order to know who two of its stars are.
But, as I’ve written about before, that’s been the issue with most Hollywood tentpoles this year. Long-running franchises — from “Fast and Furious” to “Transformers” to “Mission: Impossible” to “Indiana Jones” to the DC Extended Universe — have exhausted moviegoers, who seem to be clamoring for fresh popcorn entertainment, e.g. the huge successes of “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Barbie,” and “Oppenheimer.”
I have to wonder what David Zaslav — the headline-making CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery — is thinking after seeing the box-office returns for “The Marvels.” Zas made it a point to relaunch the DC movie universe when he inherited the WB studio, putting James Gunn and Peter Safran in charge of charting a new future for the franchise and its characters, from Superman to Batman. If I were him, I’d be scared; if Marvel can’t get people to the theater, can DC?
Then again, good movies certainly can still get people to the theater. Gunn is directing a new Superman movie to be released in 2025, and his final movie for Marvel, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” is one of the few highlights for the MCU in recent years. He knows how to make superhero movies; a big part of Marvel’s problem is that they’ve hired people who don’t. That’s not a knock on talented filmmakers like “Marvels” director Nia DeCosta, but Marvel has made a habit of recruiting up-and-coming young talent with no experience in blockbuster filmmaking, in the hopes that they can shape the human elements of the movies and leave the action to others. That’s not sustainable when any filmmaking creativity is getting lost in the post-production machine.
Marvel still has a chance to recover. In 2024, it will release just one movie — the third “Deadpool” — after releasing 10 movies over the last three years. That year “off” could give Marvel Studios a chance to recalibrate, and audiences a chance to breath. No matter what, by 2025, the MCU will be in a much different place in culture than it was in 2019, when it seemed unstoppable.
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