The “controversy” over The Marvels continues, with Brie Larson threatening to sue over her “cancellation” in further appearances in MCU films; that she comes off as arrogant and full-of-it is no surprise to her colleagues, and the people connected with the next Deadpool film have let it be known that they don’t want her in their film (no doubt for “chemistry” reasons). So I might as well do a follow-up on my post last week in which I discussed the matter of how some people don't seem to understand that if they do or say one thing, they shouldn’t be surprised at what results from it.
In an interview in Variety, Iman Vellani, who plays “Ms. Marvel” in the film, claimed it wasn’t her “problem” that The Marvels flopped and ready to lose lots and lots of money, but Disney execs’. At least she got paid. Well, she is “right” in a way, since Disney completely didn’t learn anything from the DC “woke” flop, Birds of Prey, by making a film with characters hardly anyone cared about (including Captain Marvel herself), as this list of Disney+ MCU television productions showed:
That’s .005 percent of Disney+' 160 million subscribers who actually watched the Ms. Marvel show, not that the other shows did that “great” either. Vellani also used as self-defense Stephen King’s attack on “sexist” fanboys who trolled the film, neglecting the fact that if anyone is spewing “hate” it is those like Larson who are searching every nook and cranny for males to heap abuse on. The problem of course is that King admits he doesn’t like or watch MCU or DC films, so how would he know what a good film of this type is supposed to be?
Quite a few other MCU films have flopped (just not as bad) that didn't deliberately try to alienate the core of male viewers, and for the same reasons that The Marvels flopped—people didn’t care about one or more of the lead characters, it doesn’t tell a coherent story, bringing in barely-explained plot elements from out of left field, and doesn't seem to have a "point" other than to appease a demographic that doesn't even care about these kind of movies; note that female theatergoers “flocked” to see Margot Robbie in Barbie, but not in Birds of Prey. The people who actually go to these comic book movies do so for entertainment, not to be “preached” at or made to feel marginalized.
Everything you are hearing now, you’ve heard before. Birds director Cathy Yan had this to say about her superhero film bombing at the box office: "There were also undue expectations on a female-led movie, and what I was most disappointed in was this idea that perhaps it proved that we weren't ready for this yet. That was an extra burden that, as a woman-of-color director, I already had on me anyway.”
Well, OK, but that is the kind of excuse we can now always expect to hear to explain away the real reasons for failure. If a flop is made by a male director and writers, the movie is just “bad”; but if it is made by a female director and writers, it is the “audience” and “toxic males” who are to blame.
Carrie Wittmer wrote in GQ magazine (supposedly a “men’s" magazine) that “trolls are review-bombing the MCU’s female-led film…for one obvious, sad reason.” What is that reason? Men hate women-led action films, she says. Wittmer wrote this in April of 2023, seven months before the release of The Marvels, so that had nothing to do with Rotten Tomatoes reviews, which I will get to later.
But no matter; this film which director Nia DaCosta told the world was aimed at the female audience and they were going to show the male haters that they were going to transform this film into what—what did Wittmer say now—“will most likely be one of the highest grossing films of the year after it hits theaters on November 10.” Yeah, she actually said that, because she thought “woke” females were going to go knocking down doors to see this film that spoke “exclusively” to them, and maybe allow a few males in if they dared to.
Wittmer of course boasted of the original Captain Marvel’s $1 billion gross, but that was because it was released between the biggest blockbusters of the MCU catalogue, Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, and people assumed it would be “good.” They found out too late that the casting of Larson was rightly criticized and she turned the character into an unlikable bore (just like she reportedly is in person) that was somehow allowed to be the most powerful being in the entire universe, and thus there was no character development or anything human a viewer could relate to.
Not to mention Captain Marvel didn’t appear in Infinity War, and only made a brief “cameo” appearance in Endgame, probably because her “invincibility” and coldness would have played poorly in a film where the most popular character in the MCU universe, Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark/Iron Man, was the one who had to make the ultimate sacrifice, and someone with as off-putting a personality as Captain Marvel would live on.
Of course if The Marvels didn’t turn out to the greatest movie in the MCU universe, Wittmer left us with this “warning”: “Poor pre-reviews for a film that does not come out for another seven months are unlikely to convince anyone to skip it—unless they already hate women in comic book movies.” You mean like how they hated Wonder Woman and the Black Widow? Misogyny, misogyny—everywhere misogyny. Eye-roll and slow-clap time.
The male audience isn’t the problem—it is the female audience if they don’t show up for a film that they have been told for months is for them. Again, if your only marketing strategy for the male audience is to gaslight them into seeing a movie that they are told isn’t geared toward their expectations as the principle demographic for these films, you shouldn't be surprised by what results from it.
The female audience that didn’t show is what really “killed” the movie, and we shouldn’t assume that many of them were not also off-put by how the film was “marketed”; they generally go to these movie to be “entertained” with a coherent story too.
After all the hullabaloo about “toxic males” the first weekend, did females join the “sisterhood” and march off to see The Marvels the following weekend? Apparently not, because Larson and company were too busy bellyaching about males and didn’t have time to actually “sell” the film to its “intended” audience.
Thus the second weekend saw a record-breaking box office collapse for an MCU film, the logical result of publicly scolding males for not seeing a female-centric film where all the male characters were marginalized (even Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury was relegated to being a punch line). The lesson from Birds of Prey had not been learned, and making the same mistakes but with a bigger budget only meant a bigger bomb.
Someone named Jillian Unrau on Game Rant claims that Disney set the film up to fail by releasing it during a time of MCU “fatigue.” So when should this film have been released? Two of the lead characters didn’t even exist on film or television until few years ago when they showed up on Disney+, and it wasn’t as if people cared that much if they existed or not.
The rush to add content on Disney+ led to some rather questionable decisions. Those who bothered to watch She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (and that wasn’t even supposed to be a “joke”) found a show engaged in bashing the male audience again, telling them they don’t matter, you are not welcome, if you choose to watch this show expect to be lectured rather than entertained.
Besides, Disney doesn’t want your money anyways, so why give it to them? Sure, female authors of male-bashing feminist tomes just tell you not to buy their book if you don’t want to read that kind of thing, because there are plenty of women who will spend $30 to read "that kind of thing."
But that doesn’t really work that well for action films with $200 million budgets and another $100 million for marketing, especially when you are counting on the male audience to cover the cost. Making an MCU film is the wrong business to be making a personal vanity project. Ms. Marvel may be Captain Marvel’s biggest fangirl, but she may also be the only one, and hardly anyone is a “fan” of her character, either.
Of course that doesn’t mean people will keep trying against all odds to turn the corner. Take for instance Rotten Tomatoes. Now, Amazon is infamous for its five-star reviews of one or two words. Rotten Tomatoes also has its problems with fake review-bombing to inflate the "positive" rating of a film; just this past September a PR company called Bunker 15 was accused of such. According to the Website MovieWeb,
As per the detailed breakdown by Vulture the modus operandi of PR firms like Bunker 15 allegedly extends far beyond traditional publicity strategies. They are said to court lesser-known or even self-published critics, bringing them into their fold to sway the Rotten Tomatoes "Tomatometer," a widely referenced barometer of a film's critical reception. While normally a movie scoring below 60% would be branded as "rotten," firms like Bunker 15 are purportedly engaged in meticulous operations to elevate these scores, effectively turning "rotten" ratings into “fresh” ratings.
A significant departure from the standard industry practice has been noted here. Rather than seeking the nod from critics of top-tier publications, Bunker 15 allegedly identifies and recruits obscure critics who still form part of the reviewer pool at Rotten Tomatoes.
The critics reportedly receive a monetary sum for their reviews, a practice that, if true, could significantly undermine the authenticity and credibility of the review aggregator site. Notably, Rotten Tomatoes maintains a strict policy against financially incentivized reviews, indicating that the alleged actions of Bunker 15 are in stark violation of the platform’s principles.
This seems to be what is happening on The Marvels RT page, and there is no doubt that Bunker 15 is not the only company engaging in this that many other films are benefiting from. While only 43 percent of “top critics”—26 out of 60—have given the film a positive review, this is significantly off the overall score of 62 percent, which just barely nudges the film into “fresh” territory.
Out of the 258 non-top critic reviews, 171 are “positive.” Going through the list of reviewers, I stopped counting at 100 the number of reviews that seemed to come from “questionable” sources, meaning amateurs who have a right to their opinions but have no business on a review site that purports to be “legit.”
In the meantime, the new Napoleon biopic with Joaquin Phoenix may be interesting, although I notice at least one reviewer who praises its battle sequences but still criticizes the film for being about a famous male historical figure in our time of frowning on anything with the whiff of “patriarchy.” Eye-rolling and slow-clapping, anyone?
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