Marvel Is Going to Concentrate on Quality
No, I couldn’t keep a straight face when I wrote that.
They could play numbers games with the other Marvel movies. Most people are Tinsel Town math innumerate and can be told the budget for Antman 3 was $200 million (*snort* yeah, right!) and it pulled in $460 million at the box office, so it made $260 million in profit.
Assuming Marvel wasn’t lying about the budget and they were, it lost at least $100 million at a minimum. But low information types will buy it.
However, Disney couldn’t play those games with the Marvels. At a box office gross of $200, it was too big of a failure. The audience’s indifference was palpable.
Consequently, Marvel offered the excuse that they had “Concentrated on quantity over quality.” The problem is that The Marvels flopped back in November, now it’s May, and Bob Iger is still saying that. It’s one thing to offer up an excuse when it’s basically required but when Disney keeps offering the same excuse for this long that means that it has become official doctrine for the servants of Mickey the Great and Terrible. Every executive in Burbank has convinced himself that it was quantity that diluted the quality.
Rather than face the truth: The quality sucked. The last good Marvel film was Avengers: Infinity War. Endgame was a narrative trainwreck with a spectacular battle scene at the end. WandaVision had a few moments but the overall message that Scarlett Witch was justified in everything she did because she felt sad was nothing short of evil. If the show had made it clear at the end that she had indeed been the villain, I would have called it a win. But the bad guy was a white man whose every action was entirely justified. It was the first sign that the people now running Marvel were in desperate need of a morality coach.
Marvel blew its stack this week when McDonald’s launched a Happy Meal series with toys from the Avenger movie that is due next year. The official reason Marvel is angry is because one of the toys is a major spoiler for the movie, Red Hulk. A rumor they have been denying for years. But what they were really angry about is that Marvel has slid so far down the prestige ladder that McDonald’s couldn’t be bothered to move their Happy Meal launch date. Because this was when the next Avengers movie was supposed to launch. Marvel is upset because Mickey Dee’s didn’t give a fuck if Marvel was going to be upset or not.
Marvel’s next movie, in fact, sole movie this year is Deadpool 3. A project that was started when Fox was a separate studio. While the Deadpool movies haven’t cracked the billion-dollar mark they have delivered major bank for very little budget. $60 million budget versus an $800 million box office for Deadpool I and a $100 million budget against another $800 million for Deadpool 2. So unless they went nuts on the budget this time it’s going to be pretty much an automatic win for Marvel.
Maybe.
From Empire Magazine:
It’s nice to be able to rally behind one feature project this year,” (Kevin Feige) tells Empire. “I’m much more comfortable being the underdog. I prefer being able to surprise, and exceed expectations. So it does seem like the last year, which has not been ideal, has set us up well for that.”
Kevin, someone should have told you this. When you’ve been the uncontested World Champion, you can never be the scrappy underdog again. You can only be a has-been trying for a comeback.
