Variety article on "Crisis at Marvel"

[Mister Mets]

Rafa Alvarez wrote the cover story "Crisis at Marvel: Jonathan Majors Back-Up Plans, ‘The Marvels’ Reshoots, Reviving Original Avengers and More Issues Revealed" for Variety.

They've got problems with Jonathan Majors, and have considered ways to replace him.

The most pressing issue to be discussed at the retreat was what to do about Jonathan Majors, the actor who had been poised to carry the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but instead is headed to a high-profile trial in New York later this month on domestic violence charges. The actor insists he is the victim, but the damage to his reputation and the chance he could lose the case has forced Marvel to reconsider its plans to center the next phase of its interlocking slate of sequels, spinoffs and series around Majors’ villainous character, Kang the Conqueror.

At the gathering in Palm Springs, executives discussed backup plans, including pivoting to another comic book adversary, like Dr. Doom. But making any shift would carry its own headaches: Majors was already a big presence in the MCU, including as the scene-stealing antagonist in February’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

Expectations seem low for The Marvels.

“The Marvels,” which opens in theaters on Nov. 10, will struggle to get the ball past the infield, at least by Marvel’s outsized standards. The movie, which cost $250 million and sees Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel, is tracking to open to $75 million-$80 million — far below the $185 million “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” took in domestically in its debut weekend last year.

Directed by Nia DaCosta, “The Marvels” unites Larson’s heroine with two superpowered allies, Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau (introduced in the 2021 Disney+ series “WandaVision”) and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (first seen in the 2022 series “Ms. Marvel”). But instead of seamlessly building on the success of “Captain Marvel,” this move resulted in four weeks of reshoots to bring coherence to a tangled storyline.

Marvel's "fix it in post" attitude didn't quite work with the last Antman.

Feige isn’t the only person showing signs of strain. Marvel’s entire VFX battalion, including staffers and vendors, is struggling to keep pace with a never-ending stream of productions. This past February, when the credits rolled at the world premiere of “Quantumania,” shock rippled through the Regency Village Theatre in Westwood over some shoddy CGI. “There were at least 10 scenes where the visual effects had been added at the last minute and were out of focus,” says one veteran power broker who was there. “It was insane. I’ve never seen something like that in my entire career. Everyone was talking about it. Even the kids of executives were talking about it.”

The schedule swap with “The Marvels” had left the “Ant-Man” sequel in a squeeze, pushing up its postproduction schedule by four-and-a-half months. Marvel films are known for coming down to the wire, given Feige’s ability “to foam the runway and land a plane that way,” says one executive familiar with how the company operates. But this level of unfinished was unprecedented and would be noted in scathing reviews when the tentpole with the $200 million budget opened 11 days after the premiere. Critics weren’t the only ones dismayed. Fed up with 14-hour days and no overtime, Marvel VFX workers voted unanimously to unionize in September, sparking an industrywide trend.

She-Hulk was expensive, partly due to last-minute changes.

But some internal sources suggest Alonso was a scapegoat and point to the “She-Hulk” VFX issues as a symptom of a deeper rot — namely a lack of oversight on script development. In the original arc of “She-Hulk,” a flashback of star Tatiana Maslany’s transformation into her Hulk character didn’t take place until Episode 8, the penultimate episode. But after Marvel’s brain trust watched footage, it realized the scene needed to happen in the pilot episode so that audiences could see more of the character’s backstory early. That meant that the VFX team was tasked with fixing the mess in postproduction.

“The so-called bad VFX we see was because of half-baked scripts,” says one person involved with “She-Hulk.” “That is not Victoria. That is Kevin. And even above Kevin. Those issues should be addressed in preproduction. The timeline is not allowing the Marvel executives to sit with the material.”

All the while, Marvel was bleeding money, with a single episode of “She-Hulk” costing some $25 million, dwarfing the budget of a final-season episode of HBO’s “Game of Thrones, ” but without a similar Zeitgeist bang. The August 2022 series premiere at the El Capitan Theatre foreshadowed what was to come six months later at the “Quantumania” bow: the “She-Hulk” special effects were out of focus in multiple scenes.

There seem to be problems with Blade behind the scenes.

With Mahershala Ali signed on for the eponymous role of a vampire, things looked promising for a 2023 release date. But the project has gone through at least five writers, two directors and one shutdown six weeks before production. One person familiar with the script permutations says the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons. Blade was relegated to the fourth lead, a bizarre idea considering that the studio had two-time Oscar winner Ali on board.

Amid reports that Ali was ready to exit over script issues, Feige went back to the drawing board and hired Michael Green, the Oscar-nominated writer of “Logan,” to start anew. Speculation around town is that the studio is looking to make the film, now slated for 2025, on a budget of less than $100 million — a deviation from Marvel’s big-spending strategy.

The "Crisis at Marvel" headline is a bit on the nose, especially since Crisis is more of a DC term (Marvel generally goes with War(s)

[Tofali]

the thread needs disclaimers: Nov 1st
1. One of the writer, Tatiana Siegel, was also the person who wrote all those lies about Ray Fisher
2. The framing for the story about Blade's narrative shifts, seemed ready made fodder/bait for online grifters/incels to distribute at their leisure. Nothing professional in that article.

Here is a tweet from Ray Fisher and more in the article I've linked below.



Otherwise If all these is true then it doesn't bode well for the future of the MCU.

Article
https://screenrant.com/zack-snyder-j...sher-response/

Original Tweet

https://twitter.com/ray8fisher/statu...er-response%2F

Update: Nov 2nd

It has been just one day and the veracity of that article by Tatiana Siegel is being called in to question by a writer who worked on a Blade draft



Original Tweet
https://twitter.com/StarrburyMike/st...07202793349261

[protege]

I was interested in " thunderbolts" but now I hear it might be tanked.

[numberthirty]

Never mind that Variety also recently ran an article on DC movies that was seriously light on sourcing.

[StickMin]

I'll just say what I said in the MCU thread

The writer of this article is a known liar, who has published false things before, most famously a hit piece on Ray Fisher.

And beyond that there are multiple things they clearly bring up to stir the pot and rile up alt right reactionaries, pr in the case of what they said about Nia Dacosta is a standard practice they're bringing attention solely to bring negative on her and The Marvels.

[The Kid]

Sorry to the people above, but Variety is one of those Hollywood trades that are more accurate than not. A lot of this stuff would make sense unless you assume that everything is going great which is obviously not the case. Feige and co. have already said they need to rethink how they will work the MCU

[Pinsir]

Sorry to the people above, but Variety is one of those Hollywood trades that are more accurate than not. A lot of this stuff would make sense unless you assume that everything is going great which is obviously not the case. Feige and co. have already said they need to rethink how they will work the MCU

Yeah, a lot of stuff in the article is basically repeating information we already know too, like, we know She-Hulk and the Disney+ shows were over budgeted for what they were. I even made the argument that if you compare these shows to something like Game of Thrones the money is just being wasted. She-Hulk is the 4th best viewed MCU show too, so if that show is considered a failure, everything but Wandavision, Loki and Falcon are in the same pit as well.

The MCU fanbase just doesn't want to admit there is something wrong with their franchise and come November 10th they are going to be forced too.

[Powerboy]

Yeah, a lot of stuff in the article is basically repeating information we already know too, like, we know She-Hulk and the Disney+ shows were over budgeted for what they were. I even made the argument that if you compare these shows to something like Game of Thrones the money is just being wasted. She-Hulk is the 4th best viewed MCU show too, so if that show is considered a failure, everything but Wandavision, Loki and Falcon are in the same pit as well.

The MCU fanbase just doesn't want to admit there is something wrong with their franchise and come November 10th they are going to be forced too.

I really can't speak to the theater experience because I'm at the age where I prefer to stream all of this stuff. I still will tend to stream superhero movies more than others.

Now, that doesn't change the fact that anything wears thin after a while. Phase One was big. The rest got a lot of "It works so do that in every movie" with the standouts for me being ones like Black Panther and No Way Home that did a little humor but got away from the mold. Endgame really was the finale of an entire multi-year/ decade storyline. It's hard to follow that up with stuff that seems disjointed or, if it does have a theme, just is not grabbing as many people.

[HollowSage]

Yeah, a lot of stuff in the article is basically repeating information we already know too, like, we know She-Hulk and the Disney+ shows were over budgeted for what they were. I even made the argument that if you compare these shows to something like Game of Thrones the money is just being wasted. She-Hulk is the 4th best viewed MCU show too, so if that show is considered a failure, everything but Wandavision, Loki and Falcon are in the same pit as well.

The MCU fanbase just doesn't want to admit there is something wrong with their franchise and come November 10th they are going to be forced too.

Forced? By whom? What is going to happen that has never happened before?

[Pinsir]

Forced? By whom? What is going to happen that has never happened before?

By the numbers we have now, it looks like the Marvels is going to make less than Black Adam and may very well be a bomb comparable to the Flash (a film that was tanked to a large part by rumours that the main actor was a pdf).

[numberthirty]

Lemme see if I have this entirely straight...

“The Marvels,” which opens in theaters on Nov. 10, will struggle to get the ball past the infield, at least by Marvel’s outsized standards. The movie, which cost $250 million and sees Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel, is tracking to open to $75 million-$80 million — far below the $185 million “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” took in domestically in its debut weekend last year.

A film directed by by Raimi that was drifting off of WandaVision could wind up doing better than a film that is being released during an actor's union strike?

[numberthirty]

By the numbers we have now, it looks like the Marvels is going to make less than Black Adam and may very well be a bomb comparable to the Flash (a film that was tanked to a large part by rumours that the main actor was a pdf).

Either one of them have an actor's union strike getting in the way of being able to promote them?

[Wildling]

Five Nights at Freddy's just took a wrecking ball to the October box office despite also being available at home streaming (where it became its platform's most watched release ever) and nobody went to watch it for actors (let alone reviews) but characters, which have been famously argued to be interchangeable with each other when it comes to Marvel live superheroes. If The Marvels underperforms despite taking the IMAX screens from the delayed Dune 2, being a sequel to a pretty successful movie, and expanding the cast for what one assumes would be something worth it about it, then gosh Marvel would still be at fault for not delaying to a strike-free period then, or maybe the audience is, in a Chekhov's Gun manner, just not the same anymore.

[Maestro 216]

Lemme see if I have this entirely straight...



A film directed by by Raimi that was drifting off of WandaVision could wind up doing better than a film that is being released during an actor's union strike?

Barbie and Openheimer did well.

[HollowSage]

By the numbers we have now, it looks like the Marvels is going to make less than Black Adam and may very well be a bomb comparable to the Flash (a film that was tanked to a large part by rumours that the main actor was a pdf).

So you are saying that The Marvels will underperform. That might be a big deal if it was the first MCU movie to ever do that but it’s not. So what makes this time different than say Quantumania or Eternals?

This is not something that has never happened before.