Marvel Cinematic Universe Part II

[Gnostic]

Ha! Been waiting for this to drop. Got Loki S1, was not disappointed. Don't buy a lot of physical movies these days, but I won't have a hole in my MCU collection and these shows are worth having on disc, against the day when D+ drops them like they did Willow.

So....it dawns on me that the whole "Marvel needs to restructure, and I bet we won't see Carol around after her movie bombed!" sounds a whole lot like what people were saying with Thor 2 and Iron Man 2, AoU and whatever other movies made people think Marvel was headed over a cliff.

Marvel kind of has a problem with sequels, it seems. Other than Ant-Man and Cap, most #2's don't seem to fare terribly well in the MCU do they?

Fiege doesn't usually bend to whatever public opinion is. True, they totally changed their approach with Thor 3, but we still got Thor 3. They didn't stop doing solo films just because Dark World failed to impress, nor did they stop using Thor in the wider 'verse. We've seen Marvel adjust their approach in the past, but not their overall plans. So far, Fiege has mostly done whatever he's wanted regardless of what the fans thought in the moment, and usually time has proven him right. He's changed tactics on occasion, like with Ragnarok, but usually sticks to the overall script. I recall people not being crazy impressed with the first Ant-Man, so what did the sequel do? The same stuff as the first one, just better. I expect that is still largely the case. I expect we'll still get Captain Marvel 3, but they may go in a wild new direction with it like they did Thor. And I expect Carol will still play whatever larger MCU role they planned on, they'll just try to make her more fun, somehow. Word is Disney is slowing their release schedule, but that's not terribly surprising and doesn't really speak to a change in their creative plans, just market limitations.

Do y'all think this runs deeper and requires a bigger shakeup? Even if this is all basically the same stuff people said in the past, is it more true this time around?

Thor: The Dark World wasn't a massive Box Office bomb that had the worst second weekend drop in superhero movie history though.

[Vordan]

Yeah the difference is past Marvel movies may have gotten mixed reception but they didn’t outright bomb. They still broke even on their budgets. The Marvels is going to cost Marvel Studios and Disney up to $200 million, that’s not the kind of thing Feige can just sweep under the rug.

[gurkle]

Well, the "advantage" of exiling Captain Marvel from the title of her second movie is that they don't have to worry about making a trilogy in the traditional sense. They could simply team her up with an established popular character, the way teaming Thor with the Hulk boosted his third movie. (It was putting a lot of pressure on Carol to expect her to already be popular enough to carry a team-up with two mostly-new-to-the-movies characters.) A lot may depend on how they plan to approach her in the Avengers movies and whether it works, since there probably won't be any other Carol movie until after that, regardless.

That said, Joanna Robinson (co-author of the recent MCU book) was openly saying Larson is tired of the toxic fan backlash she received (I fully sympathize with her on that) and may not even want a prominent place in the MCU going forward, and this was before The Marvels even came out, though obviously the studio already knew it was in trouble. I'm sure we'll see her in Avengers, but who knows if there's any enthusiasm on her part for a third movie even if they offer her one.

[Drops Of Venus]

Putting her with two Disney plus characters, removing her name from title and making a silly and wacky sequal was the reason the movie failed.

Yet, Carol gets all the blame.

I gotta disagree with the Disney+ shade here. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, which made $900m in the box office, felt much more like a direct sequel of a Disney+ show than The Marvels. The main conflict with Wanda trying to get her children literally wouldn't work without a pre-established story, while Carol teaming up with her ''niece'' and a new superhero in a space adventure is relatively self-explanatory without previous knowledge. Like yeah, watching those shows help you get some backstory on who Monica and Kamala are, but I don't think someone watching them for the first time would be any more confused than people were when they saw Spider-Man just materialize himself into existence back in Captain America: Civil War.

I agree it's possible the rebranding of the franchise into this b-side, fun, laid-back adventure with no clear stakes might've hurt it. Maybe they thought they could have another quirky team like Guardians Of The Galaxy, but this just wasn't it. I'm not worried, though. It's Marvel, at the end of the day. It's not like they're gonna run out of money to come up with new stuff just because they had a few bumps along the way.

[skyvolt2000]

Yeah the difference is past Marvel movies may have gotten mixed reception but they didn’t outright bomb. They still broke even on their budgets. The Marvels is going to cost Marvel Studios and Disney up to $200 million, that’s not the kind of thing Feige can just sweep under the rug.

Funny Disney had no trouble sweeping under the rug of all the other bombs that they have had in the past.

Where they didn't trash the director like they are doing DaCosta.

https://bleedingcool.com/movies/ceo-...under-the-bus/

, Iger decided to throw The Marvels director Nia DaCosta specifically under the bus at The New York Times' DealBook Summit (via CNBC). "'The Marvels' was shot during Covid," he explained. "There wasn't as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives [that are] really looking over what's being done day after day after day."

The problem is, if you look at the above list of films that also underperformed just this year alone, Iger is not suggesting that they needed "supervision." No one tried to say that Peyton Reed needed a set babysitter when Quantumania underperformed. No one said they should've been looking over James Mangold's shoulder when he was filming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. In fact, they trusted him so much that Lucasfilm is bringing him back for a Star Wars film, though it's unclear if he needs a set babysitter.

However, Iger and everyone under him are still budgeting movies like they will hit 2018/2019 numbers. No film should have to crack half a billion dollars to get out of the red, but that is the reality that these films are going into. That is a failure of management, not the creatives because no director or person on the ground filming is in charge of budgeting. The above films have massive budgets that Iger and those just below him greenlit, and if things are coming back red at the end of the day, they really have no one to blame but themselves for living in the past.

So where were these executives when the first viewings of the movie were done? And we are suppose to believe a person who is NOT the director is looking over footage daily??

If they were doing that I think we can list a TON of movies that should not have been released like Flash and Wheldon's Justice League.

[Refrax5]

Ha! Been waiting for this to drop. Got Loki S1, was not disappointed. Don't buy a lot of physical movies these days, but I won't have a hole in my MCU collection and these shows are worth having on disc, against the day when D+ drops them like they did Willow.

So....it dawns on me that the whole "Marvel needs to restructure, and I bet we won't see Carol around after her movie bombed!" sounds a whole lot like what people were saying with Thor 2 and Iron Man 2, AoU and whatever other movies made people think Marvel was headed over a cliff.

Marvel kind of has a problem with sequels, it seems. Other than Ant-Man and Cap, most #2's don't seem to fare terribly well in the MCU do they?

Fiege doesn't usually bend to whatever public opinion is. True, they totally changed their approach with Thor 3, but we still got Thor 3. They didn't stop doing solo films just because Dark World failed to impress, nor did they stop using Thor in the wider 'verse. We've seen Marvel adjust their approach in the past, but not their overall plans. So far, Fiege has mostly done whatever he's wanted regardless of what the fans thought in the moment, and usually time has proven him right. He's changed tactics on occasion, like with Ragnarok, but usually sticks to the overall script. I recall people not being crazy impressed with the first Ant-Man, so what did the sequel do? The same stuff as the first one, just better. I expect that is still largely the case. I expect we'll still get Captain Marvel 3, but they may go in a wild new direction with it like they did Thor. And I expect Carol will still play whatever larger MCU role they planned on, they'll just try to make her more fun, somehow. Word is Disney is slowing their release schedule, but that's not terribly surprising and doesn't really speak to a change in their creative plans, just market limitations.

Do y'all think this runs deeper and requires a bigger shakeup? Even if this is all basically the same stuff people said in the past, is it more true this time around?

I do think that people are generally tired of superhero movies and aren't going to the theater as much in general. Stuff like Spider-Verse is the exception rather than the rule. The Marvels wasn't a masterpiece exactly, but it wasn't a bad movie. It definitely didn't deserve to bomb that hard, but I've said that about a lot of movies lately.

I think the MCU definitely needs to recalibrate and them focusing on quality over quantity seems like a good first step. Even so, I do think the genre in general is in trouble. This is anecdotal, but I've found more and more among the general populace that it's become almost unhip and embarassing to be into the MCU lately. I see so many snide comments and jokes about it online. People are really starting to turn up their noses at it.

It's like anything else. Things get very cool and successful in culture and then the pendulum swings the other way. You see that in music all the time, where in the 90s, you have hair bands and arena rock suddenly become reviled and grunge takes over. Then grunge goes out and there's more hip hop in the mainstream. I remember ska music being huge for like 10 years before everybody started making fun of it. Music and fashion are great examples of this.

Culture shifts and audiences start to turn on stuff they used to love. I'm not sure if even the once unstoppable MCU can withstand those winds of change.

I'm sure superhero movies and the MCU will continue in some capacity, but I don't know if it'll ever be what it once was, honestly.

[Frontier]

Well, the "advantage" of exiling Captain Marvel from the title of her second movie is that they don't have to worry about making a trilogy in the traditional sense. They could simply team her up with an established popular character, the way teaming Thor with the Hulk boosted his third movie. (It was putting a lot of pressure on Carol to expect her to already be popular enough to carry a team-up with two mostly-new-to-the-movies characters.) A lot may depend on how they plan to approach her in the Avengers movies and whether it works, since there probably won't be any other Carol movie until after that, regardless.

That said, Joanna Robinson (co-author of the recent MCU book) was openly saying Larson is tired of the toxic fan backlash she received (I fully sympathize with her on that) and may not even want a prominent place in the MCU going forward, and this was before The Marvels even came out, though obviously the studio already knew it was in trouble. I'm sure we'll see her in Avengers, but who knows if there's any enthusiasm on her part for a third movie even if they offer her one.

Which is a shame, but I feel like they really haven't treated/used Larson that well overall.

[DochaDocha]

Funny Disney had no trouble sweeping under the rug of all the other bombs that they have had in the past.

This has got to be a historically bad year for Disney, right?

If you pump out a lot of hits and an occasional flop, I think it's less sweep it under the rug and more brush it off. You win some, you lose some, but win more than lose.

But if you're on a losing streak, every subsequent badly-received movie gets overly scrutinized, and the biggest losers get singled out. Plus, it's harder to get a billion in the box office, but studios are spending more.

If I had to define superhero fatigue, it would be that people are still willing to watch superhero movies, but they either want to see specific IPs, or a movie so surprisingly good that their friends and family convinced them to watch. Gone are the days when you could just roll out a new IP and tell an above-average story and expect to make $700 million bucks. Couple that with studios spending more without growing demand to go to the theatre and you just get more and more disappointments.

[Ascended]

I'm sure superhero movies and the MCU will continue in some capacity, but I don't know if it'll ever be what it once was, honestly.

Oh certainly not. And that was always going to happen. The MCU was never going to remain this massive, unimpeachable thing in Hollywood that never tasted anything but success. It was always going to have its first major flop, a moment when audiences stopped supporting it just on principal. And there will be other flops after this. Just like any other studio, Marvel will have its fair share of failures. It's a testament to the Studio that they went so long without one, truly that's historic.

But I question if things are as bad as the internet wants us to believe. Yes, the Marvels losing money like this is a major milestone in the worst way and people at Marvel need to take that **** seriously and respond/adjust accordingly. It's a very bad sign, and things have been trending downward for a while, even after accounting for non-Marvel variables like the economy, streaming, covid, etc. But I go back to the data Mace posts and from what I remember, despite all the negativity and pearl clutching, the MCU has remained respectably profitable and popular overall. We've had bigger spikes both up and down; The Marvels is a new low point but Spidey 3 is one of the few films in post-pandemic Hollywood to still crack a billion, and it almost hit 2. I'm just saying, the MCU absolutely needs to adjust and make some changes, but I don't know if they're in as deep a pile of trouble as some folks think they are. It's easy to take the changes the world has been through the last few years and use that to make the MCU look like it's dying fast, but I very much question just how true that is.

Gone are the days when you could just roll out a new IP and tell an above-average story and expect to make $700 million bucks. Couple that with studios spending more without growing demand to go to the theatre and you just get more and more disappointments.

And I don't call that fatigue. That's just the honeymoon being over, and studios having to put in effort rather than just doing ad libs with the names in a script. If people demand quality, they're not tired of the genre they've become discerning. They've seen enough to recognize the troupes and the overplayed elements, and rightfully demand something more. But if audiences were simply fed up with the genre, we wouldn't be seeing the number of successes we do. Boys, Invincible, plenty of stuff from Marvel still, even a little from DC (Harley Quinn's cartoon, Peacemaker, Titans GO!).

[Thor-Ul]

Gone are the days when you could just roll out a new IP and tell an above-average story and expect to make $700 million bucks. Couple that with studios spending more without growing demand to go to the theatre and you just get more and more disappointments.

I would say than this year most superhero movies fall in th barely-average quality category.

[mace11]

Here is some interesting chat.
Marvel Studios in Shambles, Can DC Beat them, Secret Wars with God Loki & More I TCBC

[Ascended]

Yup, worth watching. Don't usually watch this sorta stuff but they had some great comments and solid thoughts, especially in the backhalf where they were talking about Marvel being in 'shambles.' Nice to know I'm not the only one who doesn't think the entire sky is falling. Little overcast, that's all.

Though I didn't know Cap4 had reshoots that lasted that long. I'm gonna call that a good sign; you don't do reshoots like that (7-11 months according to these guys) just to tweak a few things; that film is getting totally redone and it's probably for the best. I wonder if the situation with Gaza is making them change their plans with that Israeli hero (Sabra or something?) or if they're gonna go forward with it. Like they said, poor Sam! The Falcon show had a pandemic storyline they had to change because an actual pandemic hit, now they're having to change the movie (maybe) because of Gaza...hard to be Captain America these days I guess.

[Albert1981]

I think a major issue with this phase is how the MCU introduces characters (heroes and villains). Kang's intro in Loki was severely lacking to me. I thought HWR' conversation with Loki was very hard to sit through and didn't bring any intrigue or danger into the equation.

I know it's not fair to compare a classic movie like the "Hustler" with an MCU property, but I thought Fast Eddie's first encounter with Minnesota Fats was pulled off brilliantly and immediately aroused folks' interest. If Marvel had done a tenth of the job in Loki and Ant-Man 3 that the Hustler did, I think the MCU would be in much better shape:

[staptik777]

variety
"After four weeks on the big screen, the comic book tentpole is running out of steam with $80 million in North America and $197 million globally. There would typically be optimism that attendance could rebound over the busy holiday season, but Disney apparently doesn’t expect that to be the case. The studio wrote on Sunday in a note to press, “With ‘The Marvels’ box office now winding down, we will stop weekend reporting of international/global grosses on this title.”

The film isn’t leaving theaters just yet, and the $220 million-plus budgeted tentpole is expected to play through New Year’s. However, this memo signals that it’s not expected to generate notable coinage during the rest of December. Over the weekend, “The Marvels” tumbled to 11th place on box office charts with just $2.4 million in its fourth outing."

[Dipter]

I knew that meme would pop up in this thread at some point.