Spoilers The Marvels grade and discussion

Is negative prognostication helpful?

 

There aren't any, even the negative reviews say they loved Ms Marvels' character and the people who actually saw it (the ones without blatant agendas) all admitted it wasn't horrible.

 

Yeah, from what I've seen most of the reactions to it have been fairly positive.
It's got an 8/10 on IGN
A B- on EW
CBR doesn't do quick ratings, but I jumped down to the last couple paragraphs to see how they sum things up, and they seemed to enjoy it.
And even on here most of the ratings in the poll are B or above.

 

Well, maybe everyone who only just got Disney plus to study up before watching the Marvels, are still trying to complete Secret Invasion, and once they have completed that life threatening tedious chore, The Marvels is going to make 2 billion from it's 7th week?

 

I mean, I would be curious to see when all the datapoints are available to explore. One, going to the theater is less common due to streaming availability, financial limitations and an upcoming holiday in the US, which resulted in a lot of people going to the store for Thanksgiving prep, not the theater.

Does this explain all of it? No, and I doubt we'll ever know. But, I'll tell you what. As someone who is less familiar with Captain Marvel and the Marvels, but kind of interested, the negative talk from people is not encouraging. Rarely do I find myself swayed by the crowd but this time it takes a mild interest and lowers it because even if I enjoy it, who will I talk about it with?

 

Thing is, most of this negative talk doesn't seem very different from comments tossed at most of Phases 1 and 2.

Let's be fair, if this had been a Phase 2 or 3 film it would've done better

 

Fair is the last thing this is being.

 

Where? Seeing mostly high scores around here.

Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes which some people around here (not me) seem to trust, is 83%

 

Two pretty bombed films out of 33 total is a decent Box Office average compared to say, the DCEU, which had 2 Box Office successes out of 16 films, with the last 3 bombing at about the same level as The Marvels; and the majority of the DCEU doing about the same or slightly worse than Ant Man: Quantummania.

Aquaman, Batman V Superman, and the first Wonder Women are the only DCEU films to do well in terms of Box office, and only Aquaman cleared the $1 Billion mark. makes you wonder why WB continues if the superhero film genre is so dead, especially for 13 of their offerings*.

The non-DCEU Joker also cleared $1 Billion and their non-DCEU Batman film cleared $770 million, but I still think the suits see the latter as "underperforming".

And given the MCU GotG III film which was the last one released prior to The Marvels cleared $845 million; you still have to wonder IS it MCU fatigue, or is The Marvels Box Office just a confluence of factors including the overall fact that the character itself isn't really the same level of comic fan 'draw' as say Spiderman?

 

Those of us who did enjoy it.

 

Don't forget Waterworld. All three films I remember actually enjoying. In fact, as a teen watching Ishtar, I had no idea until later it was considered a disaster.

 

If Zawe Ashton wanted the movie to succeed, she would have gotten her Boyfriend to work for scale or free, for a lot more than a cameo.

Imagine if there was a 20 minute Dar-Benn/Loki romcom added to that, and then a ten minute love scene with Zawe and Tom?

 

I agree it was and I love it. That's the point. This movie feels like Marvel bought into the internet hate train about how 'no one likes Captain Marvel, she's too arrogant and emotionless and the movie is boring and only succeeded because of Endgame', etc. And then tried to appease people who were never going to give this a fair shot anyway by mandating it must be as short, fast-paced and zany as possible - with a strong dose of extra humility for Carol - rather than letting it be the length and tone that best fits the story and letting Carol's character arc be fully organically developed and explored instead of just kind of being there.

 

Oh, i'm certain some are hoping beyond hope that there's some magical formula, or set of circumstances that will give The Marvels a 700 million dollar boost. There's no formula or magic that'll make audiences flock to see this film.

 

Brie Larson Sex Tape?

 

Not cool, not funny.

 

This may simply be a good movie that not enough people care to watch. Lots of good movies with low box offices, but they also tend to have much lower budgets.

Another theory. Comics peaked for Gen X. And this new stuff is post the Gen X peak comic reading. Most End Game and before pulled from storylines that came out early 2000s or early. Lots of 80s and 90s comic stuff . And some stuff went all the way back to the 60s.

 

Sometimes you see that generational drift based on people having read entirely different comics. After Days of Future Past I was in the theater bathroom when these guys came in behind me and one of them was saying he thought the guy at the end was Mr. Sinister.

 

C+

Iman Vellani was good. Some fun banter with the leads. Other than that, definitely the most disappointing Marvel movie since Thor 2. Worst MCU villain without a doubt. Pretty much everything with Fury and cats was beyond dumb. The story was simply bad. I think I've had it with multiverse stuff. Meh.

 

Plenty of successful MCU films have required homework and past knowledge of previous entries, by audiences.

Doctor Strange 2's "Wandavision" plotpoint (involving her children and their 'death') for that film was far more central to that film than any of the D+ connections for The Marvels, and audiences still pushed that film to 955.8 Million Worldwide.

Infinity War is a great example of a film best experienced when the audience has previous exposure to all those 40 characters in previous entries.

Who's they? The Marvels could only dream to have the strong legs, repeat viewing and word of mouth that Spider-Man NWH enjoyed for weeks on end, amidst the height of Omicron. By all metrics, NWH was a well-written film that mainstream audiences could easily access.

Quantumania did decent on D+ and it's still considered a massive financial loss for Disney, with it's theatrical failure and pricetag.

Conversely, the Flash did poorly on streaming, audiences didn't care. And "The Marvels" is pacing under "The Flash" on all accounts.

"The Marvels" is going to lose Disney 200M-300M, regardless of streaming. At it's current pace, it will struggle to get to 200M WW, on a 270M theatrical budget (plus marketing).