I am not rooting for it to fail by any means, in fact I just bought tickets to see it, but I couldn’t help but notice that nearly every showing on its opening Saturday was empty or nearly empty at my local theater. Is this going to be Marvel’s first post Avengers (2012) theatrical failure?
Didn’t Eternals and Quantumania flop also? Maybe it’s just me but I think a lot of people are getting super hero fatigue and trying to keep up with all the Marvel mini-series is just becoming work and not so much fun.
Neither of those two movies made enough at the box office to cover production and marketing. What a time to be alive, when a flick that pulls in $475M is considered a flop. I’ve run out to see every Marvel film since the MCU kicked off on opening weekend, so I’d say I’m a standard reliable fan: I fell alseep in the theatre during Eternals and thought most of AM&TWQ was ugly hot garbage.
That said, I’m super excited for The Marvels. I loved Captain Marvel, and Ms. Marvel has been my favorite of the Disney+ MCU shows so far. However, I read an article yesterday about how the recent Secret Invasion D+ series, arguably the worst of all of the shows, sets up a chunk of the plot of the movie, so casual fan will be at a disadvantage, and folks like myself who consume all the Marvel stuff dutifully will likely not care or wish they could retcon it away. I agree there’s superhero fatigue; Kevin Feige can’t count on even getting close to a billion box office any more, the way he could pretty consistently from 2017-2019 or so. I hope this breaks the MCU’s rough patch (notably, the last Dr. Strange and Spider-Man movies did really well, so not all of Phase Four crashed and burned), but the fact that so many of their TV shows are now required viewing to catch yourself up with the feature tentpoles isn’t helping the bottom line, no matter how solid the product is on either platform.
I’ve been hearing about super hero fatigue for decades. Weird how I never hear about cop movie fatigue or horror movie fatigue.
Though I am familiar with the concerted online hate mob against Brie Larsen and the last Captain Marvel movie. Same with most female-led superhero fare. Take what you will from that.
My take is that people turn out for entertaining movies. Everything else we read is people creating hot-take content for clicks.
This is where I stand. I loved everything until the end of the Infinity Saga, I’m liking some of the D+ shows, but it’s just feeling like work to keep up with it all now.
I have no interest in seeing the new Marvels movie. Maybe at some point i will, but with all the many shows out there, most of them i haven’t had time or interest to finish, i wonder if I’ll be lost.
Marvel themselves know the movie is tracking poorly. The just-released final trailer starts out with a long sequence of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers even though they aren’t in the movie, simply as an attempt to appeal to the audience’s memory of how great these movies used to be. It’s pretty nakedly desperate.
I was a big fan of what they were doing through the Infinity Saga but man have the wheels come off since then.
Maybe it’s not really superhero fatigue but simply fatigue for Marvel and DC properties. I didn’t even see the last Batman movie in the theaters, I still haven’t seen it at all, and a few years ago that would have been unthinkable.
I think you were supposed to… for the life of me, I canNOT figure out how that or The Inhumans got made. Generic casting, substandard writing, wooden acting and utterly unconvincing dialog.
And that’s how I’d feel if it were a Charlton Comics movie. For a Marvel film… sheesh.
But I LOVED the Ms. Marvel series, so I’ll go just to see her. And Brie Larson was great in her movie (with bold writing… the Skrulls aren’t bad guys? Whoa…).
The trailers were a problem for me. The first trailers made it seem like a lighthearted romp in the vein of the Ms Marvel show (which was very uneven in quality). The look of it made me think it was a series not a movie. The final trailer made it look super cereal and barely showed Kamala at all. I’m assuming the marketing team let them know the first strategy wasn’t working. I don’t know what this movie is going to try to be and I don’t know if I want to see it.
With all the Disney series shows and tie-ins, the whole thing started to feel like homework and I don’t care about super heroes that much. I also didn’t find Cpt Marvel very interesting (same issue as Superman) so a Cpt Marvel movie that assumes I watched 20+ hours of some other show is a complete nonstarter.
When the last Dr Strange came out, there were people/articles saying how you really needed to have watched WandaVision to understand it. Then some people said “No, it helps for some stuff but you don’t NEED to…” but I’m just not invested enough to risk it. Especially for $20+ and three hours in a theater for what’s supposed to be a fun action movie I might or might not understand.
This. Endgame and the immediate aftermath (Black Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Wanda/Vision, etc) just emotionally drained everything Marvel had been building for a decade. I worried about a hangover, but I didn’t expect it to hit so hard or last so long (shades of my last weekend partying). The movies are still visual masterpieces and entertaining (except anything Ant-Man, just don’t like the character or something). I’ve still watched them in the theaters and will definitely see The Marvels and other movies, I just don’t get so excited for them.
Honestly…while you probably don’t need to, it’s a pretty good idea for most people. Particularly if you were neither A.) a comic book fan that already knew key points of the Scarlet Witch story line or B.) the sort of person that is happy to just go with the flow and intuit/fanwank plot background.
Otherwise WandaVision really is the lead up to the film. Now I enjoyed WandaVision in of itself (it’s clever, if a little slow to rev up for some), so this was no impediment for me. But I have no problem with anyone deciding that was just way too much commitment to prep for a popcorn flick.
I honestly thought it was a Disney + series until a few weeeks ago.
I stopped reading comic books about twenty years and I wish I could tell you it was because I matured and outgrew them. No. I stopped reading them because of how they marketed the comics. I was reading Nightwing and his story would be interrupted by something happening in Batman, but if I wanted to follow that story, the one that interrupted my Nightwing story, I had to go then buy a Birds of Prey issue to keep up with it.
I kind of feel like they’re doing the same thing with the movies and television series. If you didn’t keep up with Wandavision, you were likely at a loss as to why Wanda was suddenly a villain. Who has time for all that?
Is this the shortest Marvel movie? (1:45 is what I get on search). This site seems to confirm this:
Marvel Studios Movie Runtimes - Murphy’s Multiverse (murphysmultiverse.com)
I’m looking forward to this and it is kind of refreshing not to have to plan my liquid intake leading up the the showing so carefully, but I’m wondering why it isn’t following the trend of 2+ hour Marvel films.
I think I’ll start calling it Comic Book Guy Syndrome, where someone feels like they have to know all the backstory, all the callbacks, all the plotlines, all the explanations. There’s no patience for letting things unfold with some mystery, for just having fun in the moment.
I won’t tell others how to enjoy their entertainment, but trying to be C.B.Guy does not help me enjoy. I don’t care if I miss something. I don’t care that there’s not an explanation for why this or that happened. If I like the character and the story is fun, then it’s all good.
There’s always been C.B.Guys. They’re why I didn’t get into comics when I was a kid. (Except for Usagi Yojimbo.) Somehow, the surge of superhero movies and shows have elevated C.B.Guy to some sort of ideal to emulate. C.B.Guys have important contributions to the fandom, but they’re not the only way. There’s too much gatekeeping. I feel some C.B.Guys want to return to the old days when superheroes were more niche and less mainstream.
(On preview, that got kind of ranty, but I’m not directing it at anyone specifically, but the general approach of entertainment critique.)
It probably will, even though it is getting good reviews so far. I don’t think it’s super hero fatigue, Endgame was just a clear end point for the story.
(Homer Simpson voice) “It will be a spectacular flop.”
If it flops some people will definitely blame it on the female cast. That’s disappointing, because women should be allowed to be blamed for bad movies without bringing their gender into it.
Mostly Marvel’s “string of flops” is due to them just not being that good of movies. Anybody remember Black Widow, or the mentioned Eternals, which I’d forgotten about? Super hero fatigue will vanish the second somebody releases a good superhero movie. Expecting known characters to make a movie a success is a mistake Hollywood makes all the time. Usually it just means the movie sucked, not that there’s something wrong with the character.
Of course, if I knew exactly what could make a good movie I’d be some sort of film mogul, not just typing into the void.