Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
- Thread starter bbjeg
- Start date
That's actually really fascinating. Having Steve be a man ahead of his time, this time.
Damn, there's so much unchartered potential with Rogers on the table.
Karli was a terrible villiain, but if you made John Walker into the central antagonist, I think it would have worked quite well as a movie.
I don't see what the complaints were with Karli, that people thought she should've been portrayed as 100% Psychotic from the very start even though she had legit grievances with the GRC?
John Walker doesn't work as a villain for me
Honestly I didn't think Karli was awful. Just underwritten. FaWS had a good point but it's at odds with Civil War
Woke up to see that even the projected low of $47 million dollars for opening weekend was too high and $45.5 million is more realistic. If that is true, there is now an outside chance that the domestic run struggles to beat the opening weekend for the Taylor Swift concert film.
Regardless it will likely finish at about $100 million (domestic). With those sorts of numbers, I would think that Thunderbolts is dead or at least heavily reworked.
Regardless it will likely finish at about $100 million (domestic). With those sorts of numbers, I would think that Thunderbolts is dead or at least heavily reworked.
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By this logic, they should never have made more movies about Captain America after First Avenger because that film wasn't some super smash.
Seeing the top-down racism of the Civil Rights Movement era through the view of a white male superhero only worked in the printed Captain America stories of the late 60s / early 70s because Rogers was--at the time--still a fish out of water having to come to grips with blatant racism his sheltered American sociopolitical life never allowed him to encounter, hence the then-importance of meeting / partnering with Wilson, who was dealing with his own journey of either managing his black life attempting to dot every "i" and cross every "t", or lean toward the political militancy from people in his own life (some of whom referred to him as a "Tom"). I'd fear a film with a 21st century-aware Rogers involved in a critical point of American history (specifically one dealing with race) would tend to lead certain writers to have Rogers make speeches / take action from the platform of modern day sociopolitical sensibilities (as if he attained a level of wisdom those in the struggle cannot see / comprehend), which would be quite offensive to many black movie-goers.
Quite a difference between "Not a super smash but made money" and "one of the biggest bombs in modern cinema".
Knock off the Doommongering, we're not talking about Batman V Superman here.
That film made money - it was not as successful as they would like but it took $873.6 million. It's opening weekend was $166 million. If we are going to play this game, you've got to be serious.
You know, it's weird how this so-called "bomb" made more than five times as much money in the opening weekend as anything else: https://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-chart/weekend/2023/11/10
Looking at this chart of weekend box office so far this year, it seems that profits have been down for months. In the past three months, the only films to do better than The Marvels on their opening weekends were that Taylor Swift tour movie and Five Nights at Freddy's. It seems likely that moviegoing in general is down, perhaps due to the actors' strike inhibiting the promotion of new films.
And look at that last column. As a percentage of the weekend's total box office, The Marvels opened proportionally better than the smash hit Barbie, getting 55% of the weekend's total box office while Barbie only got 52% in its debut (though that's because Oppenheimer got a fair chunk of the rest). Percentage-wise, that's the weakest opening for a Marvel movie this year, but it's better than Indiana Jones or Mission: Impossible's opening percentage, and just slightly below Across the Spider-Verse.
So despite the narrative some people are eager to spin, it seems the problem is not with The Marvels, the problem is that moviegoing is down overall.
Karli was fine as a character, but the show portrayed her as being basically in the right until she randomly decided "what if we started killing people?"
Don't get me wrong, I think a great show could be made with a villain who starts out with the best of intentions but then fell down a slippery slope, but I think it was handled poorly. And if they couldn't handle it in a miniseries, it certainly couldn't be handled in a movie (IMHO these sort of villain arcs only work where the focus of the movie itself is on the villain, like Joker).
The show also blinked at the last second, considering Sam didn't even battle Karli and she was just shot in an anticlimactic way by Sharon Carter, after which Sam carried out her body and gave a speech admonishing everyone to do better. It was portrayed as a tragedy that she died, rather than a catharsis. Which is...fine, but wouldn't have worked at all in an MCU feature, as (aside from Infinity War, for obvious reasons) Marvel doesn't want to have you leave movies on a downer note.
Ultimately, Karli was in some ways a crappier Killmonger - a villain who was actually in the right when it came to the moral stance, but used the wrong methods. Only Black Panther made it clear from the start that Killmonger was a shitheel, even if he had a point, and there was the familial drama aspect to add personal conflict.
Walker was a better villain because he ties more directly into Sam's internal conflict about taking up the mantle of Captain America. You can position the two characters more starkly as portraying different facets of American exceptionalism, with Sam as what's good about America's legacy, while John represents what is tainted. Also, there is personal animosity/resentment.
In contrast, Sam just really, really wants to be Karli's friend, and Karli wants Sam to get out of the way before he gets hurt. There's just a lot less dramatic potential there.
That was not how I was looking at it, to be honest. I think the interesting narrative tension is that Steve would want to be a public ally, but he could not, having to stay in the shadows.
Again, maybe a partnership with Isaiah Bradley could help here. Yeah, I know that he told Sam he was imprisoned for 30 years while the CIA/Hydra experimented on him. But this could always be retconned into a cover story. Maybe Sam finds out about him, gets him released to undertake a covert mission against Hydra, but despite succeeding, he goes back to prison for another decade plus? There's ways this could be handled.
One aspect that I think it's worth considering is there's been jack shit at the box office for months, likely in large part due to the studios holding back films for release after the strike. There's been several times I've looked for a movie to go see over the past few months and been shocked at how little is at the box office.
The lack of much of anything in the theaters may have just trained the moviegoing public to not bother any longer. If so, the studios really fucked themselves over.
* Friday Nights at Freddy's cost $20 million to make, has taken $251 million, with a video on-demand release on the first friday.
* The Taylor Swift movie looks to have cost $10 - $20 million to produce and has taken $240 million.
* The Marvels looks to have cost about $250 million to make and looks to make about $180 million.
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It's actually kind of shocking to me how much money Marvel Studios has historically wasted on reshoots. In some cases it seems like (as is the case with Secret Invasion) they essentially made a product twice, with the first version never seeing the light of day. It would be way easier to make a mid-budget film if they just stuck to the final script and filmed in a more orderly fashion.
Honestly, I think it would be a gold mine for Disney to just start releasing cut clips from their various MCU properties as Disney+ exclusives. Dirt cheap to make (since it's all just sitting there) provided no VFX are needed, and fans would eat it up.
Honestly, I think it would be a gold mine for Disney to just start releasing cut clips from their various MCU properties as Disney+ exclusives. Dirt cheap to make (since it's all just sitting there) provided no VFX are needed, and fans would eat it up.
Which is why it's a good thing they're going to have showrunners on their shows going forward. Hopefully that will bring more discipline to the process.
FNaF has crazy name recognition as a series and got proper promotions and marketing
Taylor Swift is Taylor Swift
The Marvel got next to no marketing, promotions and folks who didn't have D+ were upset because they thought they'd need it to understand the movie 100%, due to marketing not being clear enough.