I would say Hawkeye's one issue was it was too overstuffed. Adding Echo, Yelena, and Kingpin took away from the focus on the Clint/Kate relationship.
Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
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I would say Hawkeye's one issue was it was too overstuffed. Adding Echo, Yelena, and Kingpin took away from the focus on the Clint/Kate relationship.
Oh, but Yelena and Kate made an awesome double act.
Yeah, but they could have saved it for later.
As I have said, if I were gonna do phases 4/5 over, I'd probably just restrict Disney+ shows to introducing Young Avengers and Midnight Suns characters, to later be featured in team-up movies. Yelena is a bit older than some of the other Young Avengers, but IMHO their dynamic could have waited until that movie to gel.
Funny, "Lower Stakes" worked fine for Netflix Marvel and those characters were just as "Terrible" as Clint and Kate.
And frankly I thought Yelena was a better character than Natasha.
I thought those 2 were annoying together. The macaroni joke wasn't funny at wll
Lower stakes isn't what made the Netflix heroes good. I don't see how Clint and Kate are anywhere close to those guys
To me yelena is just nat + more bad quips
The box office is often wildly misinterpreted. The entire covid era is completely uncomparable to anything that happened in phases 1-3. It's completely impossible to say how truly successful any of those movies were based on the box office. (Even No Way Home, which is probably the clear end point of the pandemic, could easily have perhaps made even more in a world where no one was staying home from the theaters because of Covid.)
Post covid, the MCU box office returns have been clearly good with the only real exception being Ant-man. And not only were they clearly good, they were literally about on par with phase 2, which is exactly where they should be because phase 3 levels of box office could not possibly have been maintained indefinitely. Seriously, compare MoM to Civil War while taking into account the fact that MoM was kept out of a variety of countries that Civil War released in for purely political reasons: the truth is MoM made more money than CW in the countries it actually got to show in. Love and Thunder came in under Ragnarok worldwide, but not by that much and also while being kept out of countries that Ragnarok released in.
The only ones we can seriously view as even potentially concerning are Wakanda Forever for making so much less than BP and Ant-man for actually failing. And even then, anyone who seriously expected Wakanda Forever to make the same amount of money as BP was just setting themselves up for obvious disappointment. I don't think that was ever possible even in the hypothetical world where the star of the movie didn't die before it could film. In the world we live in, Chadwick died and yet WF still made over 800m ww. That's a damn good success. And in any reasonable assessment, a better success than any non-Avengers film from phase 2.
So, yeah, Ant-man is the only real weak link here. And it deserves that status, to an extent at least. (I still maintain its actually the best ant-man movie overall, but it certainly isn't close to the level of any of the other phase 4 or 5 movies except Eternals and yes both of them are deeply mediocre at best.) But it still made 400m+ despite the worst reviews in the history of the MCU, is not at all the least successful movie in MCU history financially, and clearly did not torpedo the possibility of people being interested in other MCU movies given the success of Vol. 3.
They can't be compared to pre-Covid numbers, that's true and that was Marvel at its absolute height where they could have filmed Superheroes eating toast and still would have made bank. Post Covid there is about a 30-50% drop and that's a time where people rushed out again to watch movies and have a social life in general and yet most movies from Phase 4 onwards were mediocre earners at best, which to me translates into people realizing that the MCU movies were not as good as they used to be.
Now all this is highly subjective as people define quality for themselves but overall numbers do paint the picture in a certain way and this means that Marvel will not be scratching the billion dollar mark anytime soon, they will struggle to break the 500 million mark and for them that's unusual. This together with the reported shakeups and problems with upcoming projects ( Daredevil, Blade) doesn't fill me with confidence at the moment that Marvel will improve soon.
If i were to speculate extremely i'd even guess that the Multiverse Saga will not be successful according to Marvel benchmarks and the likely Mutant storyline post Multiverse will be their only chance to save their franchise for good and continue but for this to happen they would have to re-evaluate everything and possibly change their entire approach as just more of the same doesn't work currently.
But those shakeups sound like changes for the better, as they ditch their haphazard "Throw stuff at the wall" approach and actually take a more disciplined route with showrunners, bibles, and a clearer sense of what they plan to do before they do it. If nothing else, that should mean fewer reshoots, less wasted money, and thus a lower bar of profitability.
Which, again, is exactly what it was just reported that they're already doing.
I'll believe it when i see it and it works ( again, subjective opinion). Just because they don't like what's been done yet doesn't mean what they want it to be will also be what the fans believe to be good. There was a time when it seemed Marvel could do no wrong and maybe they just lucked out concerning actors and chosen characters but it doesn't seem to me that they changed the formula too much - movies that more or less tie in to the bigger storyline, the occasional intro/origin movie to introduce a new hero to be involved in later movies and crossovers and for a while now using the streaming shows to address minor characters or stealth introduce new ones that they believe don't warrant a full scale movie release.
I really hope what they are doing now will improve the quality and what they are doing is bold - stopping Daredevil mid-filming of the season and firing core people of the show is certainly a very hard cut but if it's for the better bring it on. I want everyone to succeed and it's high time Marvel did something because i could count the number of movies i really enjoyed post Endgame on one hand and have fingers left over.
I've given some actual specific comparisons about every post-covid MCU movie just now. There is no '30-50%' drop that I can see.
What exactly are you basing that number on? Comparing them to phase 3? Comparing solo movies to Avengers movies (which we haven't seen released yet post-covid)? These are obviously a disingenuous comparison.
Only one movie has struggled to break the 500m mark. Every other film was closer to a billion than 500m. One of those movies made more money than Civil War (which actually passed a billion) in all the countries where both of them released, it just wasn't allowed a full worldwide release for reasons having nothing to do with quality or audience interest.
Vincent D'Onofrio weighed in on the Born Again situation on Twitter:
Every cool project I've been involved with has evolved constantly during pre- production, production and post. It's just reported on these days as if it's big news. It's not. It's simple a bunch of creatives doing their best to get it right. It's a constant in this business. I wouldn't have it any other way. Frankly I'd be worried if we were settling for less.
It's not about opinion, it's about the objective facts. You said, "but for this to happen they would have to re-evaluate everything and possibly change their entire approach." And according to The Hollywood Reporter, they have re-evaluated and changed their approach. Of course we don't know yet what the end results will be, but the specific parameters you laid out in that sentence have already been met. Anything beyond that is a different issue.
And it's not just a question of whether they "like" what's been done. It's about the specific changes they've instituted to address the problems -- like abandoning their haphazard approach and adopting the tried-and-true method of TV writing and production that's worked consistently for generations. That sounds like a good idea if they want to avoid the kinds of problems reported in the article. Is it a guarantee? Of course not, everything in entertainment is a gamble. There are always plenty of things that can go wrong, but at least if you can get rid of some of the known problems, that improves the odds.
I'm basing box office on this:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchise/fr541495045/ and to me it shows a signifcant drop in the lifetime gross revenue since Covid ended with very few exceptions. Only 3 movies post Covid in the Top 10 have earned enough money to be in that category and to me it just shows that the movies are not as well received as they used to be. We can argue about the cinematic reasons but that would go nowhere since it is highly subjective, the numbers are about the only thing one can objectively and accurately measure.
It doesn't matter though in the end, does it? Marvel has realized it has a problem on its hands and is working to correct it, hopefully for the better.
Objective facts are that they are changing their approach, that's about it. Only the finished products will show if this action was successful and their idea of what the MCU should be is shared by the fans. So i'm not sure what your point is in your reply, i've said the same and just repeated it in case it wasn't clear.
Yes, and that's the part I was addressing. You said things wouldn't improve unless they changed their approach at some hypothetical future time, which seemed odd to me coming just hours after the big report that they already had changed their approach.
I wish people would understand that when I call out a specific detail, I'm talking about that detail, not the entire conversation in general.
You're still not giving any actual information about what you're comparing here. I don't need help finding the box office results. The problem is you're fundamentally not even saying what exactly you're comparing.
For instance:
"to me it shows a signifcant drop in the lifetime gross revenue since Covid ended with very few exceptions"
Lifetime gross revenue of what specifically and compared to what specifically? All of phase 5 compared to the entire pre-covid MCU? Individual movies compared to their previous movie? Something else?
"Only 3 movies post Covid in the Top 10 have earned enough money to be in that category"
What category are you talking about?
As for whether it matters, Marvel will think what they think and do what they do and none of us will have any real effect on that beyond choosing to buy tickets or not. But, yeah, it matters a little to me when people insist on painting false narratives about how Marvel's current state is 'proven to be bad' by the box office when the box office absolutely isn't bad for any movie other than Quantumania, which does not represent the entire MCU.