Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | November 30, 2023
After three weeks in theaters, The Marvels has earned an anemic $77 million at the domestic box office. It won’t break $100 million. Globally, it’s no better. In fact, with worldwide grosses only at $187 million, The Marvels may not earn back its $219 million budget. There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The Marvels is a financial failure.
Some have sought to blame the Hollywood strikes and the inability of the actors to promote the film as the problem, while others have blamed the sexist toxicity from Marvel fanboys who have inexplicably had it in for Brie Larson since Captain Marvel.
Bob Iger, during the NYTimes Dealbook conference yesterday, had another take. He suggested that, because of the volume of content, there weren’t enough Disney suits to oversee the films. “The Marvels was shot during Covid, and there wasn’t enough supervision on set.”
The Marvels didn’t fail from lack of oversight. The Marvels is a good movie, probably the best in Phase 5 of the MCU. The Marvels failed because of Secret Invasion. It failed because of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It failed because of The Eternals.
The worst thing that Marvel did after Avengers: Endgame (and Spider-Man: Far From Home) was to jump back into making more Marvel films. Audiences needed a breather even longer than the two-year break imposed by the pandemic, partly because many Americans spent the pandemic with their new Disney+ accounts watching MCU films. Do you know why Peacock’s fictional Tiger King series failed? Because after spending all that time in the pandemic with Tiger King, no one wanted to watch it anymore.
The next mistake Disney made was to release Black Widow to home viewers. I liked Black Widow (it’d have been better if it’d been released before Endgame), but by letting viewers watch it at home, the MCU lost its theatrical shine for the first time. It was one thing to release In the Heights or even Jungle Cruise to home viewers, but by releasing an MCU film to the digital market before its theatrical run, Disney took MCU movies off the pedestal.
It didn’t help that Marvel released six MCU television shows during the pandemic year. That burned many of us out, but we kept up with the MCU anyway because the MCU hadn’t given us a reason not to give in. It was annoying that we had to keep up with so many shows and movies, but we did so until Marvel finally faltered.
The wheels began to fall off the wagon between November 2021 and March 2022 when Marvel delivered virtually back-to-back inferior products: The Eternals and Moon Knight. They weren’t necessarily terrible, but they also weren’t as good as what came before them, and after watching Black Widow and, for most of us, Shang-Chi in our living rooms, we needed a better reason than The Eternals to get off our asses. We needed a better reason than Moon Knight to keep up with too many MCU series.
Once you miss one movie or television series and realize that doing so does not turn us to dust, nor does it necessarily trigger one’s FOMO reflexes, it’s easier to skip the next and the next. Suddenly, we’re no longer watching every MCU project; we’re being more selective. We’ll only see the ones we think we’ll love, and why not? We’ll wait and watch the rest on Disney+ … unless something better is on.
Now, we’ll wait and read the reviews or listen to the word of mouth before we decide to watch Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Marvel released six movies in a year! Plus, four more the following year, in addition to all the television series. Do you know how good it feels to quit a lousy series midway through its fifth season? That’s how it felt deciding to quit the MCU.
We were done! Cooked. Burnt out. We may occasionally check-in, but the MCU will no longer be a chore!
And then, along comes Secret Invasion, the worst MCU series to date, and a series that leads into The Marvels. Suddenly, the two series that some viewers sat out on — Secret Invasion and Ms. Marvel — seemed crucial to The Marvels, and no one wants to do homework before watching a movie, especially if the homework involves watching Secret Invasion.
The Marvels failed because it should have introduced Ms. Marvel — genuinely the best Marvel character to come along since Tom Holland’s Spider-Man — in a big MCU movie and then given her a TV series. It failed because Secret Invasion failed. But mostly, it failed because bad movies and TV shows gave us a reason to be more selective.
So, no, The Marvels didn’t fail because of lack of oversight. It didn’t fail because there weren’t enough suits in the room. It failed because Disney got greedy and thought all their movies and series were too big to fail until viewers decided that it was just fine if they failed because we’d rather see movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer anyway because they don’t require watching 33 films and ten shows to understand them.
That said, people should watch The Marvels, at least when it arrives on Disney+. It’s fun, and Iman Vellani is the best thing to happen to the MCU since 2019. Previous knowledge of Ms. Marvel and Secret Invasion are unnecessary.
