The Marvels It is shaping up to become the film that will bury the Marvel Cinematic Universe. A very weak film that led to a devastating opening weekend. Things are not improving, and the film’s box office performance can only be described as catastrophic.
The drop in revenue between the first weekend and the second – within the United States – has suffered a huge and unprecedented drop for Marvel Studios in the 87%. They have barely raised 2.8 million dollars on Friday, November 17. Months ago we were talking about the absolute failure that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania when the box office dropped by 69.9% between the first and second weekend in theaters.
The enormously bad results of The Marvels in cinema mark a trend within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which both the series and the films released after Avengers: Endgame They are of increasingly worse quality, with some notable exceptions. Spider-Man: No Way Home and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3they are saved in the cinema. Ms. Marvel, Hawk Eye and WandaVision It is the most decent thing in the case of TV.
But movies like Eternals, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania either Thor: Love & Thunder and series like Secret Invasion have shown that these are not specific cases, but rather a very worrying trend within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We shouldn’t be surprised by Disney’s decision to stop everything and completely restructure the way these series and movies are being made.
More reasons for the terrible failure of The Marvels
Not even the presence of Brie Larson, that it is a series that continues the events of Ms. Marvel, or the fact that the film shows the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has saved it. Unfortunately, the production is simply not good and to make matters even worse, the most interesting thing happens in the post-credits scene.
Furthermore, the franchise is facing an almost indisputable fact: The Multiverse Saga is boring, confusing, lacks a completely clear common thread and to top it all off Jonathan Majors, the actor who plays Kang – the main villain who replaces Thanos — is accused of physical abuse and harassment.
To this we must add that Marvel has explained the multiverse in five or six different ways, in different productions. There does not seem to be an agreement between scriptwriters on how to introduce parallel realities to the franchise and it is, frankly, an absolute disaster. We saw it for the first time in Spider-Man: No Way Home from a spell, then the approach changed a little in Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness. But in Loki it seemed that the multiversal branches were created from time lags. Finally, in The Marvels multiple universes are revealed by a disruption in space due to a very large concentration of force.
In addition to the unnecessary, but self-inflicted, complexity of the multiverse, there is the absence of some of the characters that catapulted the Marvel Cinematic Universe for being iconic and well-constructed. They simply haven’t managed to replace Tony Stark, Steve Rogers or Natasha Romanov.
Maybe the X-Men and The Fantastic Four will help Marvel recover, find its way again and build new stories that reconnect with the audience. Let’s hope they don’t simply use nostalgia, although it seems that the shots are going there.