Would the MCU have a healthier reputation and box office situation if they had gone with these 2 movies earlier instead of lengthening the stablished heroes' stories? (Love & Thunder, Quantumania, Marvels...)
So I feel like a lot of people recently are saying that Thunderbolts\* and Fantastic Four: First Steps have made them get back to be interested in the MCU and its future. So I was wondering that.
Commentaires
People want to salvage the Multiverse Saga. The whole thing was a misfire, long before Jonathan Majors legal problems.
This whole saga was originally meant to be over in 2024/25. Had there been no COVID or Majors controversy that might’ve actually happened.
If it was just the intended five year plan like Feige said it would be in 2019, people wouldn’t be calling it so disjointed and directionless.
Then Phase 3 arrived with a ton of interconnectivity starting with Civil War. And some more major crossovers in Spiderman Homecoming and Thor Ragnorok.
I think people partially misremember how we got there. Like even with now Thor Ragnorok holding it up, Thor are easily the worst movies. Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston are just that good.
Disney, like many other entertainment companies, were looking for a Business model they could sustain with Covid potentially lasting years and years - we had no clue how it was going to play out in 2020 and into 2021.
Thankfully the virus effects less people as we move forward, they still had this business model they threw together out of a sort-of panic to trying to get people to "Sub" to Disney+....
Thats why they spammed us with those ridiculous "Timelines" and schedules; they were trying to show - you need Disney+ in your home cause every 1 1/2 - 2 months, a new marvel movie or show is coming.
Also, Star Wars was still in play at this point too, so they get overextended as well.
It was a marketing/management decision made during a time of great uncertainty - and fuck ups happened.
Also, I believe the franchise was 100% going in with Black Panther as the new "Leading Man" for the series;
His passing was so horrible for his friends and family, Im not trying to bring him up flippantly to make a point.
They may have had to toss out months or years worth of scripts and planning, etc - and also ruined the connectivity of the characters cause Black Panther would have been that mold, the new Cap America and the new Iron Man, rolled into one, for atleast 1 Saga of 5-10 films. Introducing new characters to eachother, Iron Man and Cap style.
Black Panther was going to be the main glue holding it together, then back up by Dr Strange as the second leading Avenger for now; let Dr Strange finish his Saga in this next set of Avengers films, then you would have carried Black Panther into films even further down the line.
The scripts and crew were put, frankly, into an impossible situation.
Disney was never going to hold back from going gun ho with Disney+ due to Covid. The Marvel authors were scrambling for so many reasons, sadly.
Sorry for wall of text, just my take on it
And your second point makes no sense as a response to what I said. I was saying films like MoM and L&T still did very well financially because people already loved Thor, Dr. Strange, Wanda so went out to go see them opening weekend, but then when they saw how bad they were, there were no return viewings, and word of mouth resulted in these movies cratering
If they had started 2022 with Thunderbolts and F4, which, again, are not that great anyway, following Eternals, (which was another new team, and which was universally panned)….this would’ve likely resulted in the MCU’s reputation tanking even faster
The only people who even saw these movies were MCU superfans and maybe a few normies who wandered in by accident
It's the only audience-response metric that does *anything* to combat review-bombing (besides CinemaScore, which is measured in-person, but both of those movies got A- there, which is good).
That's objectively false. FF wouldn't have made money if that was the case.
*More* people saw FF than saw Cap 4, but FF got *better* audience reaction than Cap 4 got.
What you're describing is mathematically impossible.
I don’t know where you live, but in the US, the marketing campaign for FF was insane. You couldn’t walk five feet without seeing an ad for the FF, and it *still* barely broken even. No normal people saw or gave a fuck about this movie.
I guess I should’ve phrased it better as an “Avengers-style” film. Basically a crossover of sorts bringing together multiple heroes and storylines in some combination. Thunderbolts definitely fits that bill.
But they really needed them as medium sized tie in movies to help develop new heroes and have them meet and fight together. it also works as a shortcut so you don't need a sequel to expand a character and have them connect with other parts of the cinematic universe. It really worked wonders in phase 1-3.
That's why this new Avengers is going to have Fox X-Men, two Avengers teams and the return of RDJ. It can't just be a smaller simpler movie about some heroes teaming up to stop some supervillains or skrulls it has to have the whole Multiverse at stake.
But doing it now, where do they go from here? Sure, the mutants have their own stuff to adapt, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four too, but what about the Avengers?
They are also doing Avengers vs X-Men with Doomsday, so they better come up with something in the comics (where lately things aren't going great creatively speaking) because I don't see how they can top this or where they can go with the Avengers.
Galactus has been done. Apocalypse is a X-Men thing. I don't see what they can do with Doom that would top Secret Wars (which is a problem). Maybe taking the premise of Ultimatum (Magneto vs the entire Marvel universe) and making it good? Idk, but there's nothing as big as Secret Wars.
First steps relies alot on the audience being emotionally invested in the characters (more so than most mcu movies) and with out that build up it felt unearned. Why do I care if these characters i just met have to give up their baby?
So yeah - ultimately the first fantastic four movie which established these characters (and among other things this issues they had with having a baby) should hav4 been a few years back.
If you release them in reverse order I think we'd be in the same place, but the first two would've done FAR better.
Eternals, F4, Thunderbols, Marvels, etc… all unnecessary. They spread themselves too thin. The movies were good while they were focusing on a small group of people.
Love and Thunder was the first time we saw Thor after Endgame and there was more hype.
The F4 might be famous but it came in too late and it's a very formulaic movie, I really think that they should have taken a risk and make it so that Galactus won, it's been a while since a villain won and it would have been a more impactful ending.
"But avengers and GoG!" You mean teams of actually different superheroes with more colors than grey and red?
The critic/audience reactions to L&T and Quantumania woke the MCU brass up and let them know they had to start putting more effort into these movies. My guess is that if they’d gone with Thunderbolts or FF4 first they’d have both been garbage as well.
Now it feels like a formula, one that people are tired of
Marvel tried to introduce something new with The Eternals and the fans hated The Eternals, even though (IMO) the film was quite good by Marvel movie standards.
So Marvel pivoted, didn’t bother following up Shang Chi (also pretty good) and pumped out a bunch of sequels for existing characters / Disney+ tie-ins instead, assuming they were giving fans what they really wanted (more of the same).
IMO, Endgame was so conclusive that it killed the series momentum and audiences used it as jumping-off point for a never-ending story.
So even though serious fans would've loved a Thunderbolts* movie in or as an ending to Phase-4 rather than Phase-5, the general movie going public doesn't care for it, as long as they understand the film. For them, the phases and stuff was just unexpected gibberish, and they lost interest. Maybe they would've loved Thunderbolts* and F4 then. Maybe not.
Thor Ragnarok was such a success that not many would've expected Love and Thunder to do so bad - the bad villain arc, bad VFX and unnecessary forced humour. And that VFX issue was sustained from the start of the Phase-4 with Black Widow and Doctor Strange in Multiverse of Madness. For me, the current line up would still work if they released it slowly and made a proper flow, than going Quantity over Quality.
But we got the movie, about 4 years later that .. I know "strikes "but still this movie should have been greenlit together with other movies /shows too and come in late 2022 atmost.
The shooting was scheduled for mid june 2023 pre strikes ffs. That's way too long.
So yes, Thunderbolts along with Cap 4 and F4 should have come out earlier
I always was a strong believer of we don't need AM4 and Thor 2, so I wouldn't mind if they never happened at all.
And CM 2 should have been team up with some Infinity Saga main player or someone popular like Shang Chi , not a TV show teen and a secondary character most avg audience wouldn't recognise, and even the MCU regulars never cared much about.
My theory is that it's too expensive and the release window got too small so many people are willing to wait for some movies to start streaming a month or three later - since they are already paying for the streaming service. Why spend $100+ to take the family to the movies when you can wait a few weeks and get it for the ~$20 per month?
Plus, theatres suck. We've always known this, it's why people wanted home video in the first place. Sticky floors, uncomfortable chairs, the faint scent of urine, noisy kids, shitty food, on and on. Audiences went to the theatres because they had no choice. Now they do, and it shows.
One can say that the erosion of trust from phase 4 and 5's movies made Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four lose money, but the reverse is also true: the critical and audiencs scores of these latter two are inflated due to being somewhat competent in comparison to the other failed projects. Otherwise, there's no reason for that score to not turn into Box Office numbers. People have checked out of MCU, in part due to the fanbase's erratic behavior of "everything is fine" and hiding their head in sand to deflect any criticisms.
The problem with Phase 4-6 is that the name means nothing anymore. Phases don't end with anything big anymore because there are no Avengers film.
However, I don't think Fantastic Four and Thunderbolts being released earlier would have changed anything. What they needed was a better release plan and better written movies and less output of movies and shows
Thunderbolts would have been so much more successful riding the endgame high.
Would have given the MCU time to breathe. Would have given the fans time to miss everyone, given the characters space/room to grow, and would have been genuinely exciting to see them pop up again a few years down the road. Plus it would have given the fans time to get invested in new group of characters too.
For example, in order to watch thunderbolts with full context, you need to watch:
Ant Man and the Wasp (movie)
Falcon and Winter Soldier (show)
Blah Widow (movie)
Hawkeye (show)
Eternals/Brave New World (movies)
It's so much more confusing and convoluted to keep up now. I really think shows should have been only used to bring in the less well-known characters like Moon Knight, not cool m for continuing the stories of established avengers that future movies depend on.
EDIT: "Blah Widow" might be the most on-point autocorrect typo I've ever had lmao
Personally I don't even think phase 4 & 5 was all that bad, the only true disappointments for me were love & thunder and secret invasion, others were kinda iffy which is like the "mid" thing which i guess is more damning but it had a lot of highs too.
The box office situation is far more complicated than super hero fatigue. A lot of it is Movie Theater fatigue. There's a large portion of viewers who would rather wait the few months until the movie is released on the streaming platforms they pay way too much for.
There's a dramatic trend now for big movies to only make ~100 million opening weekend and then less than 700 million domestically overall. The top two movies this year, Minecraft and Lilo and Stitch didn't crack 600. The last film to get 800 million domestically was Spiderman No Way Home in 2021. There's been a steady decrease in domestic box office since then. Hell, in 2021 the second highest domestic movie was Chang-Chi at 200 million but it was still COVID times.
It appears the Chinese market has slumped as well for western films. Part of it is they are not importing as many films as before due to tariffs. Before, the big movies were relying on China and other foreign markets to double the domestic intake. That isn't happening as often now.
So it boils down to the domestic viewership slumping across the board as streaming becomes more prevalent and expensive coupled will slumping foreign profits.
They should have told any epilogue essentially right after endgame. So for stuff we already got would be Wandavision, and FATWS as well as ant man quantum mainia. Anything that directly dealt with the fallout and after effects of the biggest event in cinematic history should have been decked into while fresh. In this time you could have also had more original heroes come out and in certain movies they did in fact get the sharing a movie thing right like with Chavez and strange maybe mighty Thor and Thor too but there are times where it really isnt there. They really should have had more original heroes have their own time and if they didn’t want to use a theater spot for that d+ was right there with the lower budget too. If they had added more original heroes while wandavision and fatws was airing they might have caught on more and thus could have their own movie instead of sharing because they don’t think they can carry a movie.