Deadpool & Wolverine: $438,300,000
The Marvels: $206,136,825
Madame Web: $100,298,817
(Yes, I know Madame Web isn’t an MCU movie.)
Here’s looking at you, bub.
It’s almost like people like good movies. Who would have thunk it?
.
Also:
I’ve seen it said that people didn’t like The Marvels or Madame Web because the average comic movie audience is sexist as hell and hates even the idea of female protagonists. I’m not going to pretend that such shitheads don’t exist, but they’re a tiny and loud minority. Female lead characters (or lead characters of any underrepresented demographic) don’t automatically lower the bar for quality for the movie. If it’s a bad movie, it’s still a bad movie.
I myself belong to a couple underrepresented demographics, although I won’t specify here which ones. I get told that I should like x or y movie because lead character is like me, but then the movie is bad with bad writing and bad acting and so on and so forth. It’s extra fun when the character that I’m supposed to identify with is insufferable as all hell (thanks guys, you telling me that I’m insufferable?). Pandering doesn’t make a movie better. Actually make a good movie, and people will like it.
I’d argue that the poor performance of female-led comic book movies is absolutely due to sexism.
Not on the part of the fans, though.
It’s like studios, writers, directors, whoever panics when they’re gonna put a woman/girl on-screen and no longer know how to use their actors.
Women in an action scene? Easy peasy
Women as an object of affection? All day with their eyes closed
Women as comic relief? Eh, they’re working on itBut once a woman is supposed to command the scene and be in charge of the action, these movies seem to fall right back into sexist tropes. For some reason, the creators can’t just write a superhero movie and shove a woman or girl in the lead role.
Case in point: Wonder Woman
The first Wonder Woman movie was essentially Thor, but with better pacing. Of course it was a great fucking film. WW87? Holy shit did they hit the sexism hard for that movie. They turned Wonder Woman into a lovesick puppy who couldn’t decide between saving the fucking world and boning some dude who hosted her dead boyfriend’s spirit. I get it and it probably could have worked had they not made the villain a cat-lady stereotype turned chick-flick hot girl turned literal cat-lady.
They keep pandering to the lowest common denominator and audiences won’t settle for that anymore. Not for their favorite characters who can literally do anything
The villain in 87 was absolutely fantastic though.
The rock or the Trump insert that had more likeable characteristics than the real Trump?
I think calling him Trump is underselling him. He’s a personification of what capitalists think capitalism is. He’s the American dream. He’s infinite growth. He’s a good deal. And even being a mythologised portrayal of capitalism, he’s still bad. If you give capitalists exactly what they want and how they want it, they’ll still destroy the world. That’s the point of the movie.
I had to be told he was a Trump insert. I honestly thought he was just a Gordon Gekko type. His only redeeming quality was he did love his son, which is why I didn’t make the Trump connection at first.
Broadly speaking, I get it, but too many aspects of the movie were either undercooked or someone needed to be willing to tell Patty Jenkins that her ideas aren’t very good. I agree with RLM said that the movie was a bunch of empty platitudes. That ending monologue was nonsense.
Also, just bring the boyfriend back with a body made of clay. It side steps so many issues and plays into Wonder Woman’s original origin.
Solid agree.
Especially when the female/LGBT/Black/immigrant story would actually need to deal with or acknowledge difficult topics executives and big studios back off rather than embrace it. It often leaves things feeling weak, or forced.
And then if you add an underbaked romance plot… Bleh
The first Wonder Woman had all those tropes too. People just seem to not remember that. I have never figured out why.
Having the tropes doesn’t make the movie bad per se. A bad use of the tropes makes it bad.
WW1 works as a dumb action flick. WW87 fails even at that. Diane giving that moral speech at the climax of the movie felt like a 80s cartoon “moral lesson” - thinking about it, it sure feels like the movie was a big budget, 80s toy-seller cartoon episode
I’d argue that the first one used those tropes whereas 87 fell back into them to the point that they became themes.
Solid agree.
Especially when the female/LGBT/Black/immigrant story would actually need to deal with or acknowledge difficult topics executives and big studios back off rather than embrace it. It often leaves things feeling weak, or forced.
And then if you add an underbaked romance plot because women need to be paired up to have a happy ending… Bleh
If it’s a bad movie, it’s still a bad movie.
For me personally, the reason I absolutely despised Captain Marvel had absolutely nothing to do with the gender. I hated that movie for the same reason I hate almost all depictions of Superman: universe defining power with no real character growth, meaningful struggle or change.
They start with godlike power but don’t know it, discover they have godlike power, and then proceed to trivially dismantle the plot with some contrivance thrown in that doesn’t pose any danger at all to them. It just makes for incredibly boring storytelling.
I REALLY wanted to like Captain Marvel and not just because I have a huge crush on Brie Larson but they really needed to bring their A game writers and directors for her. She really needed to be the bridge from the previous generation to the next. I felt like most of us wanted to root for her in the series but it felt just off … almost like the MCU expected us to root for her without putting in the legwork.
I’m not a writer and I’m shit with storytelling but I really thought they should have started her off on Earth and shown her vulnerable side and have her be more “human” before going all godmode.
The problem is that Carol Danvers’ arc in Captain Marvel is being emotionally repressed by the Kree. She’s a soldier from a regressive society that reduces people to mere weapons. She wins the movie when she embraces her emotions and gains full control of her powers. This is a perfectly fine movie plot on a logical level. Character has a flaw, character overcomes flaw in order to become self actualised and resolve the plot. It’s even socially relevant, because women’s emotions being treated as a taboo is a political issue in our own society. This is classic sci-fi writing. It’s even the plot of five different Halo games.
Unfortunately, it necessitates that Brie Larson must spend 90% of the movie showing absolutely no emotion or feeling. Which is a TERRIBLE directing decision especially for the new flagship of your franchise.
There are ways to use framing to play on this kind of thing and make a good movie out of an emotionless character. Look at Spock and Data. Look at Blade Runner. But Captain Marvel chose not to do that, and to play the superhero genre straight, for… some reason, which resulted in a bad movie.
Have you seen ‘My Adventures with Superman’? I think they did a great job in this series dealing with the issues you mention.
As an aside, One Punch Man is an example of a series where the protagonist is absurdly OP but super entertaining nonetheless - not a comic book series though, of course.
My Adventures with Superman
No, never heard of it. I’ll check it out at some point.
I did like One Punch Man, and yes, they lampshade the sheer ridiculousness of his power level, and even mess with preconceptions by having the origin story be as mundane as possible. I think the core difference between One Punch Man and Superman/Captain Marvel is that OPM isn’t supposed to be taken seriously. The mismatch is the joke.
I’ve never bought the idea that men need men leading characters to identify with for a movie to be successful. If you want to sell a man a magazine put a woman on the cover. If you want to sell a woman a magazine put a woman on the cover. Now this gets into all kinds of sticky issues with objectification and male fantasy, but at least proves the starting point.
Also, Wolverine has a much longer track record than alternate spider heroes. I’m not sure I would have seen this Deadpool in the theater if it weren’t for the presence of Wolverine.
And if you want to sell something to men AND women, call Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell
They can definitely cover all the possibilities.
yep, everyone loved Arcane, because was a good series, don’t matter if it have gay and woman characters
Arcane is worth a watch for the visual style alone, it looks like a bunch of hand drawn paintings in motion, it looks sublime. That it has a good story to boot is a real cherry on top
trueee same thing with miles morales
I loved arcane and I am a Dota 2 fan and a LoL hater.
holy shit arcane was so good
Yeah, it’s funny that they’ll accuse the same people whose favorites include the early Terminator, Alien, Matrix, etc movies of being sexist against strong female roles.
Sorry, but no. I loved the original Ghostbusters because of the chemistry and skill of the original actors. Weaver, Hamilton, and Moss were right up there in my favorites along with Schwarzenegger, Reeves, and Stuart.
Stuff like Ghostbusters (2016), or The Marvel’s aren’t bad because of female leads, they’re bad because of bad writing it acting and also because trying to successfully follow a massively popular series is hard, which is also why latter Terminator/Alien/Matrix/Batman/etc movies tends to be an uphill - losing -battle, nevermind if you’re replacing part of what made it popular.
But it is still possible to capture the magic with the right mix of old and new, which is why “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” managed to crawl back from the grave after the 2016 attempt (with a young female lead, because that lead was very talented in her role and had a good script to act from)
I’m looking forward to the eventual movie where Rogue sucks Capt Marvel’s powers out and leaves her for dead. Hopefully the writing will be good in that one.
I enjoyed Marvels (I thought Captain Marvel was great) but it, ultimately was tainted by cynical franchise building and it needed to feel more like a well-told story in it’s own right. It was a waste of Zawe Ashton (she should have been Moonstone so she’d have at least been able to return at some point but they are busy butchering Thunderbolts, so perhaps not) which is it’s greatest crime.
Madame Web was just awful and should never have been allowed to happen (see also every other Spider-Man-less Sony’s Spider-Man Universe movie.
Madame Web was just awful and should never have been allowed to happen
On the other hand, we got a hilarious Pitch Meeting and Honest Trailer from it.
It was one if those films where I was writing the Pitch Meeting script in my head while watching it, which helped pass the time.
That movie was so bad, writing the jokes was super easy. Barely an inconvenience.
Well, yeah.
Madame web wasn’t even a marvel movie, it was just loosely based on the name of a marvel character, and everyone knew it.
The Marvels, well, I think it was the wrong movie at the wrong time with the wrong script. It was never going to put up big numbers, and I’m not sure why anyone involved thought it would. If it had been exactly the same, but done as a miniseries for streaming, it would have done better.
But, trying to take the characters straight from their last appearances in previous stories and throwing them together just because? Was never going to work. And it sucks, because Kamala had a great show that should have set the character up for a second series, and then bump her into movies. Rambeau, I think could have been moved into a team movie and been accepted, but that’s not what Marvels was; it wasn’t a team movie. It was a forced “we gotta put all the Ms/Capt Marvels together!” movie.
It was arbitrary, in other words. No buildup, no real effort to get the characters moving towards a longer arc. It was the equivalent of the Justice League movie, where it was rushed into being way sooner than it should have been. And it flopped. I actually love all three characters, and I like or love all three portrayals of them (yes, even Larson’s badly written one is okay), and Marvels just wasn’t well written, or well directed, and I suspect too much executive meddling during editing as well.
But Deadpool? The movies have been propelled the entire time with passion, and with adherence to the spirit of the character. Of course it was going to wreck the numbers of anything since endgame. Even without Wolverine, Deadpool 3 was going to do well.
I got so tired of superheroes movies that I forgot Madame Web is not MCU, they are all just “MCU” to me.
Pretty sure that was Sony’s plan, and why they released it in a year that’s light on mcu content.
I even thought it was DC for a moment.
I completely forget the Whatever Sony Has The Rights To Cinematic Universe was a thing.
I had forgotten about Madame Web
I wish I could.
Got to hand it to Sony for the ultimate anti piracy trick: making their movie not even worth stealing…
I rather liked the marvels movie. I thought it was better than the last couple MCU movies. It helps that I like ms marvel and Captain marvel as characters. I do think sexism and racism played a role in it not doing well, but I don’t have any data to back that up. It might not have been all in the audience (though I have known some dudes that are deeply sexist and straight up say they don’t want to watch movies with leading women), maybe maybe also how it was marketed and stuff? But I really don’t know how any of this works.
I never even heard of Madame web. This supports my maybe marketing is a factor hypothesis.
I do think sexism and racism played a role in it not doing well, but I don’t have any data to back that up.
According to a poll on The Marvels’ box office performance, 65% of the audience were males.
And Barbie was the highest grossing film of 2023, so I don’t think it’s because of misogyny or anything. The sexists and racists on the Internet make up a small fraction of moviegoers.
maybe also how it was marketed and stuff?
Well, they couldn’t really market the movie at all because of the SAG-AFTRA strike, which ended literally the day before it was released.
There were also some TV spots that tried to portray the film as more serious than it actually was, even trying to tie it back to Endgame!
The Marvels was definitely a good one, it was fun, it didn’t take itself too seriously and was a nice change of pace. Shame it didn’t work out too well.
it didn’t take itself too seriously
So basically your average MCU movie.
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And that’s just from Thursday/Friday/Saturday.
Sunday could add another $50 to $75 million domestic.
I have to say this too:
Plot wise, it’s actually not great. Overall, I’d say The Eternals had a deeper plot.
But the thing is, it’s not trying to be deep. It’s not trying to come up with a gotcha that makes you think, but it sure as hell DOES make you laugh.
ENTERTAINMENT wise, this movie earn every fucking penny from myself and everyone in the theatre with me. It was a riot, and there was laughing, cheering, and a great time had by everyone.
Speaking of “fuck”, I’m pretty sure that Marvel-Disney had a jar somewhere containing every instance of that word they didn’t use in their other movie, and that they just tipped the jar over for this one and went wild. Hearing Jackman in a role where he can actually dear was surprisingly entertaining in and of itself.
I think if you’re making one of these movies, your leads have to have charisma, and if you have more than one lead, they need chemistry as well.
I find it somewhat impressive that they managed to cast so many people for The Eternals, and none of them had either of those properties.
Hearing Jackman in a role where he can actually dear
Is this a typo or the .ml censorship system at work again?
guys I think I have a hypothesis. They meant to write “swear”, a common synonym of cuss
Most likely a typo. If it were .ml’s censorship, it would say “removed”. People on other instances would still be able to see the swear word.
People on other instances would still be able to see the swear word.
No, I see effects of the censorship all the time. If the community is on .ml, all the comments go through their server and are subjected to editing, AFAIK.
If it were .ml’s censorship, it would say “removed”.
Yeah, was wondering if this was censorship v2 😂
Oh, I actually typed the word “removed”.
And I was not aware that the censorship applied to other instances.
Here, I’ll try it out and you’ll let me know if you can see the word:
In typical usage, removed is a pejorative term either for someone with an actual mental disability, or for someone who is considered stupid, slow to understand, or ineffective in some way. The adjective removed is used in the same way, for something very foolish or stupid.
In typical usage, removed is a pejorative term either for someone with an actual mental disability, or for someone who is considered stupid, slow to understand, or ineffective in some way. The adjective removed is used in the same way, for something very foolish or stupid.
Huh. So it stays removed for all other instances. Thanks!
I’ll usually happily sit through Marvel movies but I stopped watching The Marvels halfway through. It was just kinda pretty bad
I was excited when I saw the trailer but then skipped it when I saw the reviews …
I should hope so after the press junket those two did! I don’t remember the last time I saw anyone promote a movie this hard.
Madame web would have been much better if it hadn’t included three copies of scrappy doo and if the plot made sense. Just a frustrating movie to experience.
Quick, make a hundred more spin-offs featuring neither Wolverine nor Deadpool until you’ve milled all possible value from the franchise.
TIL the marvels was a movie and not a show.
There was a Ms Marvel show.
I don’t even watch most mainstream movies and haven’t seen almost any of the Marvel movies, but after seeing essentially the same headlines for two decades now every time the cast is a majority women or the director is a woman, it’s just like “okay, we get it, Americans overwhelmingly hate women, let’s move on to something new now.”
“okay, we get it, Americans overwhelmingly hate women, let’s move on to something new now.”
If Americans hated women, then they wouldn’t have paid money to see Barbie, which was the highest-grossing film last year.
