The Marvels , you know that new superhero movie

[Trafalgar]

One of the innovations of 1970s Star Wars is the stormtroopers were incased in so much armour they feel alien, strange, unsettling, aka triggering the uncanny. This is a human, but due to the armour I can not trust them for I can not see their eyes and they wish me harm.

You really feel this in the opening of Star Wars. You don't feel anything when a stormtrooper dies but you notice it when a maskless rebel soldier is killed.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

There's no "vocal sentiment" about the cast, the characters or the movie. Quite the opposite, actually. It's apathy.

Most people don't care about Captain Marvel and don't even know who the other two are. Brie Larson is the only well-known name, and she's definitely not the most popular person in Hollywood... i suppose we also have Samuel Jackson, but Nick Fury has been so thoroughly humiliated in the MCU, that he's basically a joke at this point, no longer the coolest character around.

The lack of promotion is also overstated. Everyone knew this movie was coming out and what it was about. I doubt a few scripted interviews in late night shows would change much about its failure... Not to mention that Barbie and Oppenheimer (as well as a bunch of smaller movies) did pretty well, despite the strike.

The big factor here is that, after a long stretch of bad products, people simply don't care the MCU anymore... At least, not nearly enough for a studio to justify a 300 million movie budget.

(It also doesn't help that reviews consistently ping The Marvels as bad-to-mediocre).

It's almost poetic that the first Captain Marvel came out at the apex of MCU popularity and was a huge success despite being mediocre at best, and then its sequel comes out at the exact opposite point in time and is as much as a failure as the original was a success.

All of this. MCU Carol is/was very bland. If the majority of the movies they’d made since Endgame had been decent, I might’ve gone to see this one anyway just to keep up with the story, but too many of them have been garbage so now I’m content to cherry-pick. And given their tendency to bait-and-switch (looking and you, Black Widow, Multiverse of Madness!) when I do they’re usually Sony’s movies. 😝

[Ramza00]

You really feel this in the opening of Star Wars. You don't feel anything when a stormtrooper dies but you notice it when a maskless rebel soldier is killed.

*nods* from the first introduction of Stormtroopers on Princess Leia ship

There is literally 15 seconds of set up where the stormtroopers (unseen) are trying to get through the door. It is a liminal time where we are getting wonderful sound effects, like a horror movie of the stormtroopers cutting through the door and the sound is not of saws but of rumbling like giant magnets or machines being loud

And there are 10 rebel troopers there with guns to defend Leia, and 2 of them are terrified we see their sweat and how they are looking up for their spaceship is in the belly of a star destroyer and it is making the loud noises.

And then these faceless armoured soldiers with no eyes we can see go through the destroyed door, after a bright coloured explosion and smoke. Some of them die, the stormtroopers, and they keep on going through the blaster fire like a horror film, like zombies, but more a cold machine like zombie.

75 seconds after the scene starts Darth Vader is surveying how everyone is dead, we saw these 10 people be murdered by the stormtroopers, none of them screamed yet they tried to but no sound came out of their mouths yet their mouths did open for they were almost instantly dead when the blasters penetrated their bodies.

[warty goblin]

I think it really must be said that Endgame was, for a lot of people, a very natural endpoint. Most of the major characters have their stories wrap up, the universal threat is defeated, it feels like the end of the story.

So you need to do a bit of work to keep the story going. Not a vast amount, it's very popular and people like more of what they already like. But if you're going to keep the story going, it needs to have some momentum, a sense of going somewhere. There's been 11 MCU movies since Endgame. Coincidentally, that gets you from Iron Man through Avengers 2. Has anything like the same narrative progession and momentum happened?

No. The actual main characters aren't established, the narrative momentum has shriveled up, the continuity problems and loose ends are multiplying like Tribbles, and the entire cosmology of a story that theoretically has cosmic stakes seems like it changes on a whim.

At this point fully a third of the entire MCU - excluding TV - is post-Endgame, and seems to be doing less and less with more and more. Why would you keep going?

[Murk]

By the way, does anyone know why Marvel is so weird about soundtracks / character themes?

MCU soundtracks in general have been underwhelming. I wouldn't be able to hum the themes to most of the movies from memory. The only ones I can remember right away are the Avengers theme, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel had a recognisable and pretty good theme, and then in the sequel they just ditch it!

And they do that a lot. I think none of the Iron Man, Thor or Captain America sequels used any music from the movies before, nor did their character themes carry over to the Avengers movies.
I actually suspect the reason I can only remember the Avengers, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and Spider-Man themes is because those are the only ones that are repeated in their sequels.

And I don't get why. Is it a rights thing? Is it because audiences did not respond positive? Do they enjoy writing new music?
I don't know any other movie series that just completely drops its music between films. Can you imagine Pirates of the Caribbean or Mission Impossible going "Nah, we don't need to recycle the music this time. We'll just use a completely different main theme for once"?

[Kareeah_Indaga]

MCU soundtracks in general have been underwhelming. I wouldn't be able to hum the themes to most of the movies from memory. The only ones I can remember right away are the Avengers theme, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and Captain Marvel.

You're doing better than I am; I can recognize Spider-man's, the Avenger's theme...and AC/DC's 'Shoot to Thrill' that Tony likes to blare over his speakers, and which I otherwise never would have come into contact with.

By and large they're not bad, they're just not memorable.

[Doug Lampert]

By the way, does anyone know why Marvel is so weird about soundtracks / character themes?

MCU soundtracks in general have been underwhelming. I wouldn't be able to hum the themes to most of the movies from memory. The only ones I can remember right away are the Avengers theme, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel had a recognisable and pretty good theme, and then in the sequel they just ditch it!

And they do that a lot. I think none of the Iron Man, Thor or Captain America sequels used any music from the movies before, nor did their character themes carry over to the Avengers movies.
I actually suspect the reason I can only remember the Avengers, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and Spider-Man themes is because those are the only ones that are repeated in their sequels.

And I don't get why. Is it a rights thing? Is it because audiences did not respond positive? Do they enjoy writing new music?
I don't know any other movie series that just completely drops its music between films. Can you imagine Pirates of the Caribbean or Mission Impossible going "Nah, we don't need to recycle the music this time. We'll just use a completely different main theme for once"?

I don't pay attention to the music usually, but it does help set the tone, and having a CONSISTANT motif for each character or group would seem like an obvious thing to do in this kind of movie.

[Lemmy]

I am sorry but I am going to disagree

With past MCU movies per opinion surveys where they ask people individual movies have you seen it (in theatres and other places like cable and streaming)

The US penetration factor for 20 to 54 is 1/3rd+ for any of the MCU movie, and with the Avengers movies it is 1/2+ of the 20 to 54 range.

Do you have a clue how mass market this is? A few nerdy fans is not who is watching these movies, it is pretty much everyone to some extent. All those free publicity with talk shows and so on help make Disney money.

Now it is unfalsifiable to know whatever The Marvels would make opening weekend if they were to do all those promos without a strike. All I know is Disney itself thinks these forms of publicity is a value add, and it is a big deal to Disney’s marketing arm, they believe it works even if it may be all hype,

I'm not saying those interviews have no effect, but I doubt it'd be even close to being capable of significantly affecting this movie's failure when no one really cares about the franchise anymore.

This may have been the worst flop (so far) for the MCU, but it wasn't the first and probably not the last either. And it doesn't help that recent super-hero movies from other companies were also pretty terrible (Flash).

Also, it's not like Captain Marvel was an amazing movie with a protagonist that captured the hearts of audiences everywhere... It was mediocre (at best) and the protagonist was... Well... Not exactly super entertaining or sympathetic. Literally any other movie that released under the same conditions (being teased at the end of Infinity War and marketed as "required reading" for Endgame, then released sandwiched between both movies) would have made that much money.

Sure... The interviews might have earned Disney a few extra thousand dollars, but their efficiency increases (and decreases) exponentially with the popularity of the franchise (or lack thereof)... With the MCU (and Disney in general, TBH) in its current state, an actress having fake conversations with talk show hosts wouldn't have significantly impacted the box office. Maybe instead of losing 200 million, Disney would have lost "only" 180.

Is it a factor? Sure... But it's a pretty minor one, all things considered. The big deal is, once again, that the whole franchise is in shambles right now. Phase 4 and 5 are just a sequence of bad movies and series, starring some rather unlikable and/or unknown characters too.

[sktarq]

I don't pay attention to the music usually, but it does help set the tone, and having a CONSISTANT motif for each character or group would seem like an obvious thing to do in this kind of movie.

i know one of the composers has mentioned that they edit to specific songs that are "thematically what they want" which they very often has picked quite early, sometimes even before/during shooting. This can very much constrict the composers which could part of the issue. Where they have to both avoid copying too close and getting rights slapped but also keeping The tone the director wanted and hitting the edit points.

[Prime32]

By the way, does anyone know why Marvel is so weird about soundtracks / character themes?

MCU soundtracks in general have been underwhelming. I wouldn't be able to hum the themes to most of the movies from memory. The only ones I can remember right away are the Avengers theme, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel had a recognisable and pretty good theme, and then in the sequel they just ditch it!

And they do that a lot. I think none of the Iron Man, Thor or Captain America sequels used any music from the movies before, nor did their character themes carry over to the Avengers movies.
I actually suspect the reason I can only remember the Avengers, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and Spider-Man themes is because those are the only ones that are repeated in their sequels.

And I don't get why. Is it a rights thing? Is it because audiences did not respond positive? Do they enjoy writing new music?
I don't know any other movie series that just completely drops its music between films. Can you imagine Pirates of the Caribbean or Mission Impossible going "Nah, we don't need to recycle the music this time. We'll just use a completely different main theme for once"?

There's a good video from Every Frame a Painting discussing that, and ways scenes could have been scored better

[Murk]

There's a good video from Every Frame a Painting discussing that, and ways scenes could have been scored better

That one is pretty good! I like the criticism on temp music.

But it makes it all the more baffling why they don't (or only very rarely) re-use music from the earlier movies. That's a good, fitting score to use as temp music, and then you only need to bring in a composer to add some new pieces here and there, to prevent it from feeling stale. Like any other popular movie franchise ever.

[Manga Shoggoth]

All I know is Disney itself thinks these forms of publicity is a value add, and it is a big deal to Disney’s marketing arm, they believe it works even if it may be all hype,

It's something of an old saw that 50% of the advertising budget is wasted/is a waste of money. The problem is that you don't know which 50% was the waste...

[Ramza00]

By the way, does anyone know why Marvel is so weird about soundtracks / character themes?

This is one of my big complaints about the MCU, and earnestly aural and soundtrack is one of the things to me that separate B movies vs A movies.

The tempo, the timing, the aural occasion ^{(many other words go here, I will stop though)} vastly modify how a scene feels and how it latches in my memory.

Then again while I am describing a universal phenomenon the “significance” the importances is literally high subjective for we know there are several dozens minor differences with the brain node that produces intro subjective awareness, attention switching, placebo and nocebo effect.

For that is what a B vs an A movie is, a Placebo, same sugar pill, but when Darkness Comes Tonight … aka the final showdown the music the tempo can vastly modify this Placebo effect.

[Psyren]

There's no "vocal sentiment" about the cast, the characters or the movie. Quite the opposite, actually. It's apathy.

I find that dubious when so many folks trip over themselves to both announce their so-called apathy as well as victory lap the movie's failure. For me, true apathy is more like the Blue Beetle film, a collective shrug followed by very few headlines or posts at all.

I think it really must be said that Endgame was, for a lot of people, a very natural endpoint. Most of the major characters have their stories wrap up, the universal threat is defeated, it feels like the end of the story.

So you need to do a bit of work to keep the story going. Not a vast amount, it's very popular and people like more of what they already like. But if you're going to keep the story going, it needs to have some momentum, a sense of going somewhere. There's been 11 MCU movies since Endgame. Coincidentally, that gets you from Iron Man through Avengers 2. Has anything like the same narrative progression and momentum happened?

No. The actual main characters aren't established, the narrative momentum has shriveled up, the continuity problems and loose ends are multiplying like Tribbles, and the entire cosmology of a story that theoretically has cosmic stakes seems like it changes on a whim.

At this point fully a third of the entire MCU - excluding TV - is post-Endgame, and seems to be doing less and less with more and more. Why would you keep going?

I do agree they should slow down and rethink the whole "phases" thing. Big overarching narratives and "the next Thanos" don't seem to be panning out in quite the same way, especially since the modern MCU is more dependent on streaming homework than the first three.

[Lemmy]

I find that dubious when so many folks trip over themselves to both announce their so-called apathy as well as victory lap the movie's failure. For me, true apathy is more like the Blue Beetle film, a collective shrug followed by very few headlines or posts at all.

That would be a good point, except... No one is talking about the characters, the cast or even the movie itself...

People are discussing the film's failure and what said failure means to the superhero genre, to Hollywood and (more specifically) to Disney. Because it's by far the biggest flop of the world's biggest movie franchise, which happens to belong to the world's biggest (?) entertainment industry.

No one cares about The Marvels (characters or cast), just about its failure.

I'm sure Hollywood and media personality will still still use the good ol' "everyone is a bigot" excuse that Hollywood loves so much (the director already did)... But I think public losing interest in a franchise that has only produced flops in the last 4 years is a much more likely explanation than "everyone is a bigot". Especially considering the recent history of Marvel movies (and the superhero genre in general) and just how bad of a flop The Marvels is (worst ever Marvel opening and a 87% drop in audience by the 2nd weekend. - Is Captain Marvel hated by the whole country (especially by women, since 65% of the audience is male)?

[warty goblin]

I find that dubious when so many folks trip over themselves to both announce their so-called apathy as well as victory lap the movie's failure. For me, true apathy is more like the Blue Beetle film, a collective shrug followed by very few headlines or posts at all.

Yeah, but a DC movie being mediocre/underperforming is normal. An MCU movie doing really badly is distinctly not normal.

Plus 33 movies is a lot of time for various irritations with a franchise to accumulate, you know?

I do agree they should slow down and rethink the whole "phases" thing. Big overarching narratives and "the next Thanos" don't seem to be panning out in quite the same way, especially since the modern MCU is more dependent on streaming homework than the first three.

I think they need to slow down the amount of stuff, but speed up how fast that stuff progresses. Fewer movies with fewer total characters, but those characters appear more often and interact with each other more. Currently for instance there's only an unannounced Shang-Chi followup which won't be released until 2026, earliest. Not doing anything with a character for five years is a fantastic way to kill all their momentum and advertise that they don't actually matter. Burying plot points in the TV shows is bad, honestly if I wanted to turn the MCU around I'd just axe the TV stuff entirely, it's really expensive, almost certainly has worse ROI than movies, and over-exposes the brand much, much faster because they come out over the course of a month and a half and so there's always another one of the damn things waiting to be watched.

The really short and pithy take is that up until Endgame, MCU movies were a movie series about comic book characters. Post Endgame, they've just turned into comic books, with the snail-like progression, too many characters, an absolute rats' nest of continuity weirdness, and all the other things that turn most people off from comic books.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Yeah, but a DC movie being mediocre/underperforming is normal. An MCU movie doing really badly is distinctly not normal.

At least until Phase 4 (and technically 5, but really Phase 5 is just Phase 4 with a new label because Marvel/Disney realized their brand’s popularity was starting to turn downwards and figured changing the Phase number would fix that).

I think they need to slow down the amount of stuff, but speed up how fast that stuff progresses. Fewer movies with fewer total characters, but those characters appear more often and interact with each other more.

If it had been me I’d have split the MCU into three ‘branches’ post-Endgame - Cosmic, Magic and Earth, and then come up with some overarching barriers between them so that none of the three could meet until the next Avengers team-up. So all the Magic stuff would take place in other dimensions and none of the non-Magic heroes can reach Dr. Strange/Wanda there, and a cosmic cloud is drifting past Earth blocking communications between Carol/Thor/the Guardians in space and Falcon/Ant-Man/War Machine/anyone else still on Earth. I think that would have allowed the storylines to be meaningfully concentrated, and still allowed for some crossovers and cameos while not requiring a thirty minute tangent in each movie explaining the absence of every existing hero to make sense.

Also they need to cut down on the homework. It’s okay to expect the average viewer to have seen Captain America 1 to understand Captain America 2, but not half the MCU.

Currently for instance there's only an unannounced Shang-Chi followup which won't be released until 2026, earliest. Not doing anything with a character for five years is a fantastic way to kill all their momentum and advertise that they don't actually matter.

Second this. I’d actually forgotten they’d intended to have a sequel for him.

Burying plot points in the TV shows is bad, honestly if I wanted to turn the MCU around I'd just axe the TV stuff entirely, it's really expensive, almost certainly has worse ROI than movies, and over-exposes the brand much, much faster because they come out over the course of a month and a half and so there's always another one of the damn things waiting to be watched.

Dunno if there’s enough goodwill towards the brand at this point for that to help, but that seems like a solid plan otherwise. They never should have made the TV shows required homework for the movies. The extra paywall and larger time sink are both hurdles, too.

They might have been okay if they’d done like the Netflix series and used the TV shows to flesh out existing characters, but kept it mostly one way - so no characters introduced in the TV shows get more than a cameo in the movies, unless and until they also introduce them in the movies.

I would also like to submit as a point of improvement: stop the bait-and-switches. Just because Black Panther made himself popular in a Captain America film doesn’t mean you can shove any random C- or D-lister into an MCU A-lister’s movie and expect me to care about them. Black Panther worked because he had:

1. Meaningful characterization
2. Chadwick Boseman backing that up with some excellent acting
3. HE DIDN’T DERAIL NOR HIGHJACK THE ACTUAL PLOT FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA.

The really short and pithy take is that up until Endgame, MCU movies were a movie series about comic book characters. Post Endgame, they've just turned into comic books, with the snail-like progression, too many characters, an absolute rats' nest of continuity weirdness, and all the other things that turn most people off from comic books.

Hear, hear.

[Mechalich]

I'm sure Hollywood and media personality will still still use the good ol' "everyone is a bigot" excuse that Hollywood loves so much (the director already did)... But I think public losing interest in a franchise that has only produced flops in the last 4 years is a much more likely explanation than "everyone is a bigot". Especially considering the recent history of Marvel movies (and the superhero genre in general) and just how bad of a flop The Marvels is (worst ever Marvel opening and a 87% drop in audience by the 2nd weekend. - Is Captain Marvel hated by the whole country (especially by women, since 65% of the audience is male)?

Only flops is the last four years is way too strong. Marvel has produced 10 films since 2019. Discounting Black Widow because of covid and streaming complications, that leaves nine:

• Spider Man: No Way Home was a smash hit
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 were all solid money makers at the box office
• Shang-Chi was about break-even
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a modest money loser, in the range were it will almost certainly turn a profit once secondary markets and ancillaries are factored in
• Eternals and The Marvels flopped

That's two flops out of nine, which isn't catastrophic, especially in the context of a global box office that remains lower overall than it was during any year of the 2010s and ongoing complications due to covid, especially in China, a very important market for Marvel. Also, the general consensus is that with the possible exception of Thor: Love and Thunder, which did better than reactions might indicate, and Shang-Chi, which did slightly worse, the films that did badly are generally the films that were bad. There are no 'that was great, why did no one go see that?' stories here.

Yes, Marvel appears to be no longer the license to print money it was in the 2010s. Many of the reasons behind that having nothing to do with Marvel but are related to an overall slump in take for all movies everywhere, changes in the way foreign movies are shown in China, and increasing production costs. Weaknesses in the brand do exist, and the franchise is clearly having trouble replacing the character/actor combinations it rode to success in the 2010s, but it's not an absolute disaster. At least not on film anyway.

Burying plot points in the TV shows is bad, honestly if I wanted to turn the MCU around I'd just axe the TV stuff entirely, it's really expensive, almost certainly has worse ROI than movies, and over-exposes the brand much, much faster because they come out over the course of a month and a half and so there's always another one of the damn things waiting to be watched.

I agree, putting the MCU on TV appears to have failed. It's not impossible to do superheroes on TV, I actually have fairly fond memories of several of the Netflix shows despite their glaring pacing issues, but it has to be kept restrained and street level to keep the costs in a reasonable zone. There's characters in the Marvel stable who could be deployed effectively to that end, but it needs to be made clear that it's an alternate universe not connected to the movies at all.

[Psyren]

No one cares about The Marvels (characters or cast), just about its failure.

True apathy would be caring about neither.

Yeah, but a DC movie being mediocre/underperforming is normal. An MCU movie doing really badly is distinctly not normal.

A franchise this long having this few flops is pretty unheard of. The streak had to end eventually. Good time for them to pause and take stock.

[Lemmy]

Only flops is the last four years is way too strong. Marvel has produced 10 films since 2019. Discounting Black Widow because of covid and streaming complications, that leaves nine:

• Spider Man: No Way Home was a smash hit
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 were all solid money makers at the box office
• Shang-Chi was about break-even
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a modest money loser, in the range were it will almost certainly turn a profit once secondary markets and ancillaries are factored in
• Eternals and The Marvels flopped

That's two flops out of nine, which isn't catastrophic, especially in the context of a global box office that remains lower overall than it was during any year of the 2010s and ongoing complications due to covid, especially in China, a very important market for Marvel. Also, the general consensus is that with the possible exception of Thor: Love and Thunder, which did better than reactions might indicate, and Shang-Chi, which did slightly worse, the films that did badly are generally the films that were bad. There are no 'that was great, why did no one go see that?' stories here.

Well, sure... It's a little bit of hyperbole, but not much...

The Spider-Man movies are more Sony movies than Disney movies, people go to see if because of Spider-Man, not because of the MCU. Wakanda forever did make some money. GotG3 was a middling success... i guarantee no one at Disney is popping champagne over their box office.

The other ones are "solid money makers" only if you ignore marketing budgets and the fact that studios only get about 50% of the income (i.e.: a movie has to make at least triple its production budget just to break even).

But more importantly: Other than the Spider-man movies, all of those got mixed reviews at best. Audiences aren't worries about how much money the franchise brings, but about how good the product is... And after a long streak of mediocre-to-downright-awful movies and series... The MCU isn't nearly as popular as it once was... And that's by far the main reason The Marvels failed.

True apathy would be caring about neither

Not really. Depends on what the apathy is towards. People are apathetic about the characters, the cast and even the movie itself... But not towards the meaning and consequences of its failures on the movie industry.

I can be completely indifferent to, let's say, tulips... And still be very interested in its role on, I don't know... Dutch economy in the 1600.

In any case... At this point, it's splitting hairs. You can believe that people really have some "vocal sentiment' about the characters and cast... But in that case, it has to be a lot of people. As in: pretty much the entire USA. Because only that would explain as bad a flop as this is...
Personally, I think "audiences aren't interested anymore" is far more likely than "the whole country (especially women) fiercely hate the cast and characters".

[Psyren]

Personally, I think "audiences aren't interested anymore" is far more likely than "the whole country (especially women) fiercely hate the cast and characters".

The latter is a clear strawman, and never anything that I said. What I gave as my top three reasons are not incompatible with the former, and all three of them are being echoed by mainstream thinkpieces as well.

I can be completely indifferent to, let's say, tulips... And still be very interested in its role on, I don't know... Dutch economy in the 1600.

So movies are... a speculative investment being pushed to retail investors?

[Delicious Taffy]

I watched the movie yesterday. It was a fun time. I enjoyed it.

[pendell]

On the discussion of fatigue, I note news that Frozen 4 has been announced ... when Frozen 3 hasn't even gotten to the theaters yet.

I think it's pretty clear that Hollywood, and especially Disney , are churning out Entertainment Product as quickly as they can, with concomitant loss of quality. I don't know what the end state of this is: Milk all the franchises until there's nothing left, then sell the company?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[VampiricLongbow]

On the discussion of fatigue, I note news that Frozen 4 has been announced ... when Frozen 3 hasn't even gotten to the theaters yet.

I think it's pretty clear that Hollywood, and especially Disney , are churning out Entertainment Product as quickly as they can, with concomitant loss of quality. I don't know what the end state of this is: Milk all the franchises until there's nothing left, then sell the company?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Milk everything until it is dry, reboot, try again. If that fails, then pay someone to make something new. Then milk that if it becomes popular.

[sktarq]

Not really. Depends on what the apathy is towards. People are apathetic about the characters, the cast and even the movie itself... But not towards the meaning and consequences of its failures on the movie industry.

I can be completely indifferent to, let's say, tulips... And still be very interested in its role on, I don't know... Dutch economy in the 1600.

Oh look It's-a-meeah [/mario voice]

yeah I generally get my fill of Jerry Springer type drama from the business pages and Disney has happened to fit the bill for corporate drama the last few years. I don't really care what they put on screen anymore. I used to see a 2-4 movies a month but basically stopped going at all in 2017 with only a handful seen...but that doesn't stop me from being interested in the effects of said movies (on other movies, financially, etc) or what that may mean culturally.

[DaedalusMkV]

Only flops is the last four years is way too strong. Marvel has produced 10 films since 2019. Discounting Black Widow because of covid and streaming complications, that leaves nine:

• Spider Man: No Way Home was a smash hit
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 were all solid money makers at the box office
• Shang-Chi was about break-even
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a modest money loser, in the range were it will almost certainly turn a profit once secondary markets and ancillaries are factored in
• Eternals and The Marvels flopped

That's two flops out of nine, which isn't catastrophic, especially in the context of a global box office that remains lower overall than it was during any year of the 2010s and ongoing complications due to covid, especially in China, a very important market for Marvel. Also, the general consensus is that with the possible exception of Thor: Love and Thunder, which did better than reactions might indicate, and Shang-Chi, which did slightly worse, the films that did badly are generally the films that were bad. There are no 'that was great, why did no one go see that?' stories here.

Yes, Marvel appears to be no longer the license to print money it was in the 2010s. Many of the reasons behind that having nothing to do with Marvel but are related to an overall slump in take for all movies everywhere, changes in the way foreign movies are shown in China, and increasing production costs. Weaknesses in the brand do exist, and the franchise is clearly having trouble replacing the character/actor combinations it rode to success in the 2010s, but it's not an absolute disaster. At least not on film anyway.

I was going to chime in with something similar to this, but you beat me to it. So yeah, I pretty much agree. Before anyone points out that Spider-Man is the most popular superhero of all time and his films are always a license to print money... That's only true of the good ones. Make a bad film and the word of mouth travels and the film tends to break even at best (Raimi's third and Amazing 2 both did okay at best). No Way Home was a nostalgia nuke for the moviegoing audience of the last 20 years and it brought people to the theatre in droves. I know people who haven't been to a theatre since the pandemic other than to watch that one movie, and some of them went to it twice. You can't call the releases 'only flops' if one of the 10 highest-grossing films of all time is on your list. Then right after it Doctor Strange 3 came out and a lot of people were talking about how Marvel was back. Two good movies in a row, both bringing in good audiences. The buzz at the time was that the bad years were over and the MCU was back on top. Black Widow, Shang-chi and Eternals were just a brief aberration and we had some really promising stuff on the horizon: Thor 4 couldn't possibly be bad with Taika Waititi at the helm, and the highly anticipated Black Panther sequel would be right after that!

Then Thor 4 came out, and movie audiences showed up... To hate it. It made lots of money, but the buzz this time was not good. Questions were raised. How could Thor 4... Be bad? When Thor 3 was so good? Black Panther a few months later was... Fine. But audiences were immensely disappointed nonetheless. It was supposed to be lightning in a bottle, and instead it's just fine? Oh dear. Then Ant-man 3 was a disaster, almost everyone who went to it hated it. Marvel isn't back.

And that's where we are now. Audiences are Skeptical. The MCU isn't dead, but it's obvious something isn't working.

Well, sure... It's a little bit of hyperbole, but not much...

The Spider-Man movies are more Sony movies than Disney movies, people go to see if because of Spider-Man, not because of the MCU. Wakanda forever did make some money. GotG3 was a middling success... i guarantee no one at Disney is popping champagne over their box office.

The other ones are "solid money makers" only if you ignore marketing budgets and the fact that studios only get about 50% of the income (i.e.: a movie has to make at least triple its production budget just to break even).

But more importantly: Other than the Spider-man movies, all of those got mixed reviews at best. Audiences aren't worries about how much money the franchise brings, but about how good the product is... And after a long streak of mediocre-to-downright-awful movies and series... The MCU isn't nearly as popular as it once was... And that's by far the main reason The Marvels failed.

I mean, No Way Home was definitely an MCU movie. It directly incorporates the Snap and its effects into the story. Doctor Strange is a major supporting character. Stark Tech plays a big role in the plot. And when it was happening, nobody was calling it 'not an MCU movie'. They were saying things like 'Return to form for the MCU' and 'Marvel's back!'. It was the point that movie audiences started to care about the MCU again after the humdrum of the pandemic years. Doctor Strange 3, Black Panther 2 and Thor 4 all made plenty of money, even accounting for profit sharing and marketing budgets. Not smash successes, because it's hard to make huge bank on a $300 million budget, but they all made plenty of money. Guardians 3 can't be called a flop, it's at least broken by the most pessimistic measures. The rest? Yeah, they're disappointing. And, possibly aside from The Marvels (professional reviews bad, viewer reviews not so bad), also all bad films.

As for the mixed reviews statement... Eh, not really? Guardians 3 had pretty high ratings all around, and spectacular audience reviews (including from me! It was great!). Doctor Strange 2 was a bit hit-and-miss for critics, but for the most part people who watched it liked it and lots of people watched it. The buzz around the theatres at that time was quite positive.

I'm no Disney fanboy. But it's not like Marvel has been universally bad recently. They definitely need to change up something in the way they're doing things though. It's starting to look pretty clear that the cinema industry can't sustain $300 million mega-blockbusters at a rate of multiple films per year, and the audience clearly doesn't tolerate mediocre entries the way it used to in 2018.

[Psyren]

It's starting to look pretty clear that the cinema industry can't sustain $300 million mega-blockbusters at a rate of multiple films per year, and the audience clearly doesn't tolerate mediocre entries the way it used to in 2018.

This is the main conclusion I drew as well - and it's affecting other franchises too.

[VampiricLongbow]

This is the main conclusion I drew as well - and it's affecting other franchises too.

With the success of Mario and Barbie, it kind of feels like people still want Franchises, they just want different franchises

[warty goblin]

True apathy would be caring about neither.

The general sense I've gotten is that a lot of people are not caring in a disappointed way, rather than a whatever way. That is this is a thing they would have been excited about a year or two ago, now they don't care, and they find that kinda sad.

Which, yes, probably has something to do with the characters of this particular movie. People showed up to Guardians because they're decent characters, but does anybody have strong affection for Captain Marvel? Her movie was Disney finally succeeding in their multi-film quest to remake Iron Man yet again, but with as little personality as physically possible.

But it also has a lot to with the (lack of) direction of the MCU. After 10 movies of aimlessly flopping around, why hack up all the cash to see another aimless Marvel thing when you can wait like two months and sleep-watch it at home in your PJ'S? It ain't like Disney is peddling exciting new stuff at this point, the MCU occupies an extremely narrow tonal band, it's pretty well saturated, any moderate fan has seen this stuff before, and the two cavemen who just thawed out from a glacier and somehow haven't watched any MCU movies aren't going to start the franchise on the 33rd movie.

A franchise this long having this few flops is pretty unheard of. The streak had to end eventually. Good time for them to pause and take stock.

A franchise this long is pretty unheard of, full stop.

[VampiricLongbow]

A franchise this long is pretty unheard of, full stop.

There are some franchises that are in the same league as the MCU, and some that exceed it in terms of the number of films produced, but most of those follow the same cast of characters around rather than being a bunch of smaller franchises strung together into a larger franchise-wide narrative (much less tying three independent franchises together as Marvel is attempting to do with the MCU, Sony's Spider-Man universe and Fox's Xmen franchises).