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'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

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Re: 'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

#31

Superhero movies might be in need of a breather. Fear not, for those who want pulp commercial pop culture fandom adaptations, this year was a turning point for video game movies at the box office, signifying perhaps the next decade plus of Hollywood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1iiFYDAxv4 Get ready to drown in video game content in quantities that will dwarf superhero comics, which are adapted by only a mere thr…

How on Earth does this guy make a 10 minute long video out of this being the year video game movies dethrone comic book flicks with only two films as evidence? Super Mario and FNAF barely make a pattern, let alone a trend. I don't think you have to worry about drowning in video game films just yet. Meanwhile, Mattel have something like 45 films in the pipeline following Barbie. Point your dread that way instead.

[deleted]

Re: 'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

#32
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s lots of reasons movies can be bad, but focusing on woke box checking instead of entertainment is a recurrent reason. It’s like Kamala Harris. Yes, there were unpopular vice presidents before, but she’s bad for the specific reason that Biden selected her to check demographic boxes, despite her terrible 2020 primary campaign.

To be fair, vice presidents almost always are chosen to tick boxes. For example a Northern presidential candidate will often choose a Southern vice presidential candidate and vice versa. Given how little a vice president matters (unless tragedy strikes) using them to "tick boxes" is their primary use.

Usually, the VP pick shores up support among a specific coalition. E.g. Trump picking Pence to shore up support among traditional evangelicals. But Biden was already far more popular than Harris among black voters. The campaign seems to have expected “first black woman VP” to carry weight, even though Harris had little pull among actual black voters. It’s quite distinct from traditional vice presidential box checking.

To map that to the movie analogy—Marvel isn’t making a big deal about the first Muslim super hero to make the movie popular among the 1% of the country that’s Muslim.

Re: 'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

#33

Superhero movies might be in need of a breather. Fear not, for those who want pulp commercial pop culture fandom adaptations, this year was a turning point for video game movies at the box office, signifying perhaps the next decade plus of Hollywood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1iiFYDAxv4 Get ready to drown in video game content in quantities that will dwarf superhero comics, which are adapted by only a mere thr…

How on Earth does this guy make a 10 minute long video out of this being the year video game movies dethrone comic book flicks with only two films as evidence? Super Mario and FNAF barely make a pattern, let alone a trend. I don't think you have to worry about drowning in video game films just yet. Meanwhile, Mattel have something like 45 films in the pipeline following Barbie. Point your dread that way instead.

Comic book movies seem to be dethroning themselves. Super Mario coincidentally being #2 at the box office would be the sort of tipping point for the studios to hungrily eye an alternate source of IP to adapt. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/2023/ - I will concede that FNAF is all the way at #18, which isn't very impressive).

I mean, they're already greenlighting nearly twenty Mattel based projects just because of Barbie (https://www.insider.com/all-upcoming-movies-mattel-toys-barb...), it seems like Hollywood hasn't come a long way from the video's intro anecdote about how the original Batman movie ushered in a wave of adaptations of retro pulp heroes, rather than the more naturally lucrative choice of comic book adaptations. So who's to say they won't look at the similar success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and mine video game IP for adaptations?

At the same time, I think that other than for Daniel Kaluuya's 'A24-Type' Barney movie, most of the Mattel projects are not even going to see the light of day. It's a much more limited IP vein and once there's a box office bomb or two, the studios will quickly put the kibosh on the outlandish idea. Battleship, for instance, didn't exactly unleash a huge trend of board game movies.

Outside of the theaters, The Last of Us being a huge hit and a critical darling would seem to indicate that after decades, we might finally be seeing the end of the video game adaptation curse. The fact that there are any quality video game adaptations now, let alone successful ones, is itself a sea change. And as the video theorizes, maybe this isn't 2008 so much as it's the early '00s when the original X-Men and Spider-Man adaptations came out. A sign of the shift that is to come. But I firmly do believe it so to come. There are far more video games than there are Marvel/DC superhero properties. More genres, even.

Re: 'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

#35
post #4

They keep making boring content and using progressiveness as a cover, IE: if you find the stories bland and the characters having no depth then you must be racist, homophobic or misogynistic. But I think a larger cohort of people have realised that, no, actually people were not slamming these movies because everyone is anti-progressive. The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies o…

I think they’ve also hit the limits of escalation. That’s the ultimate problem with a large shared cinematic universe. They’ve had to keep escalating the big baddies and now there’s really nowhere to go but down. They haven’t built out the “infrastructure” to focus on the storytelling quality, just what they need to pump out splashy hollywood blockbusters. It’s not like Star Wars where they can tell an infinite numbe…

Loki is over. Both as a show, and as a character. Tom Hiddleston bid a heartfelt goodbye to the conclusion of "fourteen years of my life" through the finale:

https://youtu.be/fFRl9sacyEQ?t=229

Re: 'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

#37
post #16
post #4

They keep making boring content and using progressiveness as a cover, IE: if you find the stories bland and the characters having no depth then you must be racist, homophobic or misogynistic. But I think a larger cohort of people have realised that, no, actually people were not slamming these movies because everyone is anti-progressive. The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies o…

Eh, I mean it's hard to say if there's any correlation between bad movies and progressive movies. Some of the best movies recently are progressive (everything everywhere all at once, barbie). Some recent shows from Disney are terrific too (Andor). Some terrible shows aren't progressive at all. There are definitely cases that people morally blame audiences as a false cover for a bad movie, but there are also people wh…

>Eh, I mean it's hard to say if there's any correlation between bad movies and progressive movies.

>but there are also people who can't enjoy great movies if they can find any progressive meaning in them and make a career about ranting about it.

the problem is that being 'progressive', whatever that means today, shouldn't come before making a good movie when the goal is.. to make a movie.

No one would have cared about any of Kubrick's social messages if they hadn't been wrapped in spectacular cinema.

the 'life and times' are inexorably twisted into the cinema, but some people want to just sit back and watch robots shooting lasers at each other without being reminded constantly that the world is an unjust and uncivilized place outside of the silver-screen.

I think that there is a general fatigue among spectators in the cinemasphere for the burden -- which isn't to say that 'crusading in popular media' isn't an important concept, but rather to say that a fatigued audience will be less likely to lend an ear.

Re: 'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

#38
post #4

They keep making boring content and using progressiveness as a cover, IE: if you find the stories bland and the characters having no depth then you must be racist, homophobic or misogynistic. But I think a larger cohort of people have realised that, no, actually people were not slamming these movies because everyone is anti-progressive. The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies o…

>The only issue now is that Disney owns half of all media, so if you like movies or want to go on a date or take the kids to the cinema, you don’t get a seriously large variety.

Not true, you just need to watch movies at home. I brought my girlfriend over to my place and showed her "Alien" and "Aliens" (she had never seen them) and she loved them. Why bother watching new junk when there's SO many wonderful classic movies you can watch instead? And you can get an absolutely huge flat-screen TV these days for not that much money. Who needs a cinema?

Re: 'The Marvels' has the worst opening weekend ever for any MCU film at $47M

#40
post #5

This was better than Thor4 or Quantumania. Good action, chemistry, and a decent story. Disney+ probably isn't helping. not being able to do promo work due to the strike didn't help, either.

I feel like, completely anecdotally, Disney+ is a pretty big factor, here. Maybe not in it being so much lower, but I get a free subscription to the service through something else, so I have no motivation to go see Marvel/Star Wars/Disney movies at the theater, when I can just watch them at home a few weeks or months later. I’d have done the same in the first round, if it’d been a frictionless option.
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