How much do moviegoers care about Captain Marvel these days?
Not much, it seems, as The Marvels—the new Captain Marvel movie from Marvel Studios that stars not one, but three “Marvels”—has only made $47 million domestically following its premiere last week on November 10.
The Hollywood Reporter has declared that the movie is officially a “box office bomb” in its coverage, with this figure marking a new low for Marvel Studios, worse than the $55.4 million that The Incredible Hulk and Ed Norton managed back in 2008:
…the superhero tentpole opened to an estimated $47 million at the domestic box office to rank as the worst start in the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also came in behind expectations overseas, where it launched with $63.3 million from 51 material markets for a global start of $110.3 million against a hefty $200 million production budget.
Part of the problem seems to be critical reception of the film, which doesn’t seem to be good, with Rotten Tomatoes showing a Tomatometer score of 62% at the time of this posting following negative reviews from top critics.
Some got the impression that the stars showed up just to collect a paycheck, not to mention what is apparently an uninspired choice of soundtracks:
Star Brie Larson seems pretty checked out here — almost as checked out as the jokers who came up with the idea of once again tapping the Beastie Boys for the soundtrack. “Hey, they’re on a spaceship! Let’s use ‘Intergalactic!’”
…while others have opined that Marvel movies are now super boring:
What happened to superhero movies? How did a genre rooted in astonishment, weirdness, and wonder become a byword for the normative, the familiar, and the mundane?
Here’s a description of the The Marvels, which sees Brie Larson back as Carol Danvers, joined by Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani, who play Monica Rambeau and Kamala Khan, respectively:
Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel has reclaimed her identity from the tyrannical Kree and taken revenge on the Supreme Intelligence. But unintended consequences see Carol shouldering the burden of a destabilized universe. When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her powers become entangled with that of Jersey City super-fan, Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel, and Carol’s estranged niece, now S.A.B.E.R. astronaut Captain Monica Rambeau. Together, this unlikely trio must team-up and learn to work in concert to save the universe as “The Marvels.”
Marvel’s next movies include Deadpool 3, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and Blade, a reboot of the series that will determine whether Mahhershala Ali can play a better dhampir than Wesley Snipes.
Deadpool 3 will be the first out, according to an update on Marvel.com.
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
It certainly isn't to me. It's pretty clear that Marvel has gone too far towards pandering to what it believes are "modern audiences." Anytime you see predominantly female led movies, you are almost guaranteed to get a shit show. This isn't because female led movies can't work because we saw it work prior to 2016 before that shitty Ghostbusters 2016 movie was released.
The Critical Drinker's review did say that it was oddly devoid of propping the female characters up at the expense of the males so that's nice to hear. However, as I understand it there were a lot of reshoots and delays on this thing and that was likely to make it less likely to offend Marvel's actual customers which they've largely been driving away from theaters in phases four and five.
The thing is, while that's well and good the core customer base doesn't care anymore. They can blame franchise fatigue all they want but the real problem is that these movies have bad scripts that rely on MacGuffins and other plot contrivances or coincidences to move what passes for a story along. Marvel has also had a villain problem for some time now. Even Thanos who had good screen presence suffers from weak motivations that don't often make sense because they were all originally conceived back when entertainment broke things down as simple good and evil. The villains in most comic book properties aren't much different than the black hat wearing moustache twirling villains of Spaghetti Westerns.
Sure, you have the occasionally brilliant updates to them in specific shows or films that add depth to villains like Mr. Freeze in the 1990's Batman the Animated Series and subsequent DCAU shows. But Marvel isn't doing that. Instead, characters like Ronin the Accuser and Thanos have motivations that amount too: "The villain is evil". They seek power for its own sake rather than having any motivation beyond that.
This isn't universally the case with all comic book villains, but its pretty standard fare for Marvel and the MCU. Especially as of late.
So, if your villains aren't entertaining and your heroes aren't likable, what else is there? Well, the story could have been written by ChatGPT and the visual effects have been getting worse and worse for some time now. It used to be that a Marvel movie was guaranteed to have top notch special effects but that's far from the case now. Usually its dodgy CG and nothing else. I can go back and play old ass video games or watch anything on the CW if I want to see that.
Of course, I think there is a case to be made for super hero fatigue and I think Marvel is guaranteed to lose some business because of that but the real problem is that Marvel no longer has the same track record it did pre-Avenger's Endgame where every movie was guaranteed to make a billion dollars and people were going to come away from it satisfied with their time and money. If anything, Marvel has missed the mark more and more consistently to a point where its almost at rock bottom. Between market saturation in the super hero genre to Marvel movies being almost guaranteed to suck now, only the most die hard fans are going to see these films.
I think a lot of die hard fans have had their interest die off and no one cares about this shit anymore. So even though this one might not be some "stunning and brave' girl power flick that elevates its female leads by tearing down men, it's got nothing else to offer audiences either. I'm actually surprised its doing as well as it is to be perfectly honest.
The very best thing I can say about the marvels is my buddies 12? Year olds daughters reaction to the movie. She cried because it was that meaningful to her. Maybe the box office isn't always the best measure. I'll be seeing this movie in hopes they make more like it.
I'm burned out on everything MCU.
Impressionable young people would like it even if it was good, we don't need to settle for this crap, and definitely don't need more of it.
Opening week box office does not make a movie good or bad. Since it has a female lead with 'woke' leaders I'm fairly confident you're saying it's garbage without seeing it. And you would at this point say it's garbage even IF you bothered to see it. So while I appreciate your insight into how young people see things... I'll just disagree and move on.
Yeah and these #s don't tell the whole story either. Sure it's a bomb compared to other Marvel projects but when looking at the top six US #s, and it's probably not going to make back its $220M cost. I'm burned out to but with theaters in general. We stopped going 4-5 years ago with zero interest in going back. I'll watch this when it hits streaming though.
I love how the media piles on with reporting this kind of stuff like its something new but still manages to carefully omit the other "bombs". Scorsese's $200M art piece has only managed $60M in 4 weeks. The gems on the above list averaged 3-9M each this week but those others still managed to do better than his piece over the last 3-5 weeks. The only other thing that looks even worse in the top 5 is Priscilla. Outside of Taylor Swifts thing the only real epic even that's happened in the last six months was Barbie-Heimer and before that Super Mario Bros but I'm pretty sure there were more than those 3 movies that got released in 2023 and didn't do well either that slid into the ether with little mention of their fiscal failures. I'm not defending Marvel, just saying that comic movies were loved and hated long before this and now many folks seem quite happy to ignore all the other stenches coming from Hollywood.
While I admit I'm no comic book nerd ... barely comic book literate at that ... I'll add my two cents on why I'm not compelled to see The Marvels.
I saw the Captain Marvel movie on streaming or something. I knew zero point nothing about the character before watching the movie. I walked away wondering how the main character didn't just rule the universe. The movie gave the impression she had unfathomable power with no vulnerabilities aside from self doubt, and even that washed away in self confidence by the end. Protagonists need vulnerabilities to be believable if not relatable. Captain Marvel had none.
Now why would I want to see three more of the same? The stage was poorly set for this movie's success.
YMMV
Ok... ok you see Captain Marvel Carol Danvers is the setup to establish the xmen and Rogue. From a Marvel perspective I knew about Rogue far before I knew about Carol Danvers.
Yupz, exactly.
Same here. I really don't think any movie does really that well in theaters anymore since COVID. People in general were introduced to streaming more during that time and they grew accustomed to it TBH. I'm fine waiting for a movie to hit a streaming service.
I abandoned theaters years ago. Now I just wait for BD rips.
I'm sorry, am I supposed to ignore every review that says it is utter trash, because your buddies 12 year old was impressed by it? You can't be serious.
I was never much into theaters, but that doesn't mean other people aren't still down for it. There are still movies that break the box office, so clearly the audience is there. We can't just use streaming to explain away bombs.
I think it's the above average and below movies that are really going to get beat down in the streaming age. If the movie is some kind of amazing 9.5 / 10 type movie, or has stellar word of mouth, it's going to do fine in the theater. If it's, say, an 8/10 or less, people are going to wait for it to stream. Do you really want to sink movie theater prices into a "That was good, but not great" movie?