Yep, and a certain part of the MCU fanbase is now years-deep into their "Sam Wilson should not be Captain America / Bucky should be" campaign, which they are ready to fire up next month.
Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
- Thread starter bbjeg
- Start date
Yep, and a certain part of the MCU fanbase is now years-deep into their "Sam Wilson should not be Captain America / Bucky should be" campaign, which they are ready to fire up next month.
Seems a bit early to predict, no?
Gonna beat The Marvels I guess. Box office total maybe a smidge higher than Quantumania. Disappointing, but not a disaster, depending upon how well it performs globally.
Higher than Quantumania isn't a disappointing opening. Quantumania had a decent first weekend for an mcu solo film, it just tanked very hard afterward. Looking at the list of mcu opening weekends higher than QM, more than half were the billion+ megahits and any reasonable onlooker knows Brave New World isn't comparable to those, any more than Winter Soldier was comparable to them. This would be a solid enough start to build from and if the quality is good enough to hook people, it should easily reach mid-tier mcu bo results.
First, thank you for understanding what I wrote because my sentence there was non-comprehensible IMO. I fixed it. I was also going to add Sam Wilson in, but I didn't because I didn't want to start the argument that it was just a story and Cap came back. I didn't want to start that because for the last twenty years both DC and Marvel have been trying to diversify and haven't succeeded because people don't want to buy diversified comics. And I don't have a response to that.
I agree. When did the opening weekend for a film become the arbiter of its success based on advanced ticket sales?
I don't believe that for a second. Obviously, the people who belong to diverse groups want comics and other entertainment that represents them. Look how hugely successful the Black Panther movie was, or Crazy Rich Asians, because they gave communities of color positive representation that they had been denied in American popular entertainment before. Anyone who says "people don't want diversity" is assuming that only white heterosexual men are in the audience for comics, movies, or whatever. Which is a circular argument, because if other groups are underrepresented in the audience, it's because the industry keeps failing to reach out to other groups. Black Panther's huge success proves that diverse audiences will come if they're given something to come for. It should be obvious to anyone with a shred of empathy that people who are used to seeing themselves ignored or painted negatively in fiction will eagerly embrace anything that finally lets their stories be told.
The problem is that the people in power in the industry are still mostly white heterosexual men, and while they can occasionally be persuaded to make a token effort to increase diversity, they're consciously or unconsciously biased to see any weak performance in a work that centers diverse groups as "proof" that reaching out to diverse groups is unprofitable and an excuse to give up trying, even though they shrug off similar failures of white- and male-centric stories all the time without deciding that the race or gender of their leads is the problem. And so efforts to improve diversity always end up getting crushed by the institutional inertia of a system that's built around the assumption that white men are the default group that automatically deserves to be in power, while everyone else needs to justify their existence constantly or be kicked out at the first opportunity.
Context is everything.
It is true that there's been periods of backlash from the comic-reading base toward more diverse comics, with the expected, usual cries of "woke" and some feeling vindicated in their positions when certain, more diverse comics were cancelled early. This has certainly infected superhero and fantasy movies in general, and for all of the self-congratulatory PR Disney has issued regarding this subject, their actual marketing reveals their willingness to bend to racism where non-White characters--especially Black characters are concerned. Actor John Boyega--who portrayed the tokenized joke Finn from the Star Wars sequels--took this matter to the public in revealing how his character had not only been marginalized in the films, but the overseas marketing consistently reduced his image in marketing materials (notably in China, a country with a long history of anti-Black racism in social situations and entertainment).
Example (Right):
This dropping to the knees for the business of racists certainly infected the MCU, where the average North American one-sheets for Black Panther often featured the late Chadwick Boseman's unmasked face, yet in the Chinese one-sheet, Disney bent to the will of those who did not want to promote the Black star of the film, as seen below (Left):
So, far all of Disney/LFL/Marvel's self-praising over their diverse content, they complied with the racist dictates of significant markets around the world. I've not viewed the foreign marketing materials for Cap4, but it will be most interesting to see how the film is promoted in certain countries, and what it says about Disney going forward.
Last edited:
Why do some of these tweets appear embedded in the posts while others are just links?
Chinese marketing is hugely racist. I remember this one add for a soap or something that literally had a black man using the product and coming out as a light skinned east Asian man.
Wow, I had no idea they went that far out of their way to hide the black characters in their marketing for China, that's pretty bad.It is true that there's been periods of backlash from the comic-reading base toward more diverse comics, with the expected, usual cries of "woke" and some feeling vindicated in their positions when certain, more diverse comics were cancelled early. This has certainly infected superhero and fantasy movies in general, and for all of the self-congratulatory PR Disney has issued regarding this subject, their actual marketing reveals their willingness to bend to racism where non-White characters--especially Black characters are concerned. Actor John Boyega--who portrayed the tokenized joke Finn from the Star Wars sequels--took this matter to the public in revealing how his character had not only been marginalized in the films, but the overseas marketing consistently reduced his image in marketing materials (notably in China, a country with a long history of anti-Black racism in social situations and entertainment).
Example (Right):
This dropping to the knees for the business of racists certainly infected the MCU, where the average North American one-sheets for Black Panther often featured the late Chadwick Boseman's unmasked face, yet in the Chinese one-sheet, Disney bent to the will of those who did not want to promote the Black star of the film, as seen below (Left):
So, far all of Disney/LFL/Marvel's self-praising over their diverse content, they complied with the racist dictates of significant markets around the world. I've not viewed the foreign marketing materials for Cap4, but it will be most interesting to see how the film is promoted in certain countries, and what it says about Disney going forward.
It is true that there's been periods of backlash from the comic-reading base toward more diverse comics, with the expected, usual cries of "woke" and some feeling vindicated in their positions when certain, more diverse comics were cancelled early. This has certainly infected superhero and fantasy movies in general, and for all of the self-congratulatory PR Disney has issued regarding this subject, their actual marketing reveals their willingness to bend to racism where non-White characters--especially Black characters are concerned. Actor John Boyega--who portrayed the tokenized joke Finn from the Star Wars sequels--took this matter to the public in revealing how his character had not only been marginalized in the films, but the overseas marketing consistently reduced his image in marketing materials (notably in China, a country with a long history of anti-Black racism in social situations and entertainment).
Example (Right):
This dropping to the knees for the business of racists certainly infected the MCU, where the average North American one-sheets for Black Panther often featured the late Chadwick Boseman's unmasked face, yet in the Chinese one-sheet, Disney bent to the will of those who did not want to promote the Black star of the film, as seen below (Left):
So, far all of Disney/LFL/Marvel's self-praising over their diverse content, they complied with the racist dictates of significant markets around the world. I've not viewed the foreign marketing materials for Cap4, but it will be most interesting to see how the film is promoted in certain countries, and what it says about Disney going forward.
And yet they refused to back down with Eternals and Shang Chi, so they'll stick it to China if need be.
They also still do Blackface there too, IIRC.
I found a citation here that Black Panther apparently did worse in China than any other Phase 2/3 MCU films. Of course, that's as a total percentage of global sales, so it may in part reflect higher ticket sales elsewhere in the world.
If it performs similar to Quantumania, people are getting fired. A conservative estimate is it’s at least $40-$50 million more expensive.
I don’t see it being as big of a box office turkey as The Marvels for a range of reasons, because if it was, then LOTS of people are getting fired.
Lot of moving parts on this one so I don’t really have a good personal guess on how it will do.
Again, I feel constrained to point out that The Marvels was the #1 film in its release weekend, and that every movie did poorly in that period because the actors' strike had prevented the studios from promoting the films effectively. So calling it a "turkey" is misleading at best.