"The Marvels" on pace to be the MCU's first massive bomb

[DaleCooper]

I'm so glad this crap is declining. Star Wars too.

[DaleCooper]

I saw a trailer for it a couple weeks ago when I went to see a different movie. Superhero crap aside this film just doesn't look appealing at all. I can't imagine anyone aside from Marvel die-hards and those weird people who go see literally everything wanting to watch it.

[DaleCooper]

I just checked and even Killers of the Flower Moon, an R-rated 3.5 hour movie that I saw at a matinee screening almost three weeks after it came out, had more seats filled than some of the Marvels times have at the same theater now.

[DaleCooper]

Seeing reports from box office nerds that this has the potential to literally be the biggest box office bomb of all-time. Even worse than Indy 5.

Uh, have you heard of "Heaven's Gate"?
"Cutthroat Island"?
"Ishtar"?

None of those lost as much money as this will. That’s how a bomb is defined. A film can make less money but if it has a lower budget, it won@5 bomb as hard as a huge budget film that flops.

Heaven's Gate literally bankrupted one of Hollywood's oldest and most renowned studios.
It is until today the definition of a box office bomb and perhaps the most infamous movie of all time.

(It's also pretty good if you aren't intimidated by its runtime and sit down to watch it)

It is also nearly 45 years old. The industry has changed and one bomb is not capable of sinking a studio anymore. Any one of these disastrous Disney flops would've easily killed United Artists just like Heaven's Gate did.

[DaleCooper]

Seeing reports from box office nerds that this has the potential to literally be the biggest box office bomb of all-time. Even worse than Indy 5.

Uh, have you heard of "Heaven's Gate"?
"Cutthroat Island"?
"Ishtar"?

None of those lost as much money as this will. That’s how a bomb is defined. A film can make less money but if it has a lower budget, it won@5 bomb as hard as a huge budget film that flops.

Heaven's Gate literally bankrupted one of Hollywood's oldest and most renowned studios.
It is until today the definition of a box office bomb and perhaps the most infamous movie of all time.

(It's also pretty good if you aren't intimidated by its runtime and sit down to watch it)

It is also nearly 45 years old. The industry has changed and one bomb is not capable of sinking a studio anymore. Any one of these disastrous Disney flops would've easily killed United Artists just like Heaven's Gate did.

Disney doesn’t really consider any of them bombs as it doesn’t matter what the terminally only middle aged dudes think because the studio makes its money.

They're losing hundreds of millions of dollars. I am actually what would presumably be one of Marvel's target demographics, not that I have ever liked their movies, but I don't even know who they are even trying to appeal to now.

[DaleCooper]

They're losing hundreds of millions of dollars. I am actually what would presumably be one of Marvel's target demographics, not that I have ever liked their movies, but I don't even know who they are even trying to appeal to now.

The only MCU movie to lose money under normal circumstances (not released during the pandemic) is Ant-Man 3. Everything else was profitable. Some of you people must learn the difference between one movie underperforming at the box office and being a bomb.

I think almost every superhero movie except for Spiderman and Batman post-pandemic were flops. Maybe that Sam Raimi Dr. Strange movie made money.

[DaleCooper]

Rotten Tomatoes scores are much more likely to be manipulated by the studios than by haters, but both do happen.

[DaleCooper]

The Rise of Skywalker has a 86% audience score. Those are easily manipulated and mean nothing.

They were manipulated by haters who review-bombed movies without even seeing them but that changed after the first Captain Marvel. Now you have to prove you actually watched the film before voting (through Fandango).

Yes but that doesn't mean it's a random sample of people who saw it like a poll. Die hard Marvel fan boys are the ones voting. Clearly also the case for people convinced Star Wars could never do wrong with The Rise if Skywalker although today no one defends that abomination and Star Wars die-hards hate it as much as Jar Jar Binks.

I highly doubt this movie is anywhere near as bad as TRoS but the box office numbers so far are in lime with the predictions here that were being dismissed.

The reason Rise of Skywalker had such a high audience score is after how much the last Jedi sh**t on the fans and the entire storyline , the fact that Rise of Skywalker had moments of fan service was viewed as a sigh of relief . Yes the movie was awful in every possible way but at the time it still didn’t feel anywhere near as maddening as the Last Jedi

No way. Any high audience score for Rise of Skywalker was definitely faked.

[DaleCooper]

Well this movie was indeed an absolute dud, to put it politely.

This is the kind of bomb that rocks cinematic universes and studios.

I think Disney/Marvel messed up big time by making a bunch of streaming shows nobody asked for and basically making them required viewing for movies nobody asked for either. They should have waited a few years after the complete climax that was Endgame to build an appetite and nostalgia for Marvel/superhero movies again, and this time focused on a completely separate plot with their acquired properties from Fox, X-Men and Fantastic Four. Instead this multiverse s--t has been weird and confusing and turned off audiences, and they have oversaturated the market with samey garbage. Oh and now the guy who was supposed to be their main antagonist is in legal jeopardy, and the guy who made their biggest solo movie from before tragically died, to make matters worse.

As it is, their blunders might cause capes--t to go the way of the dodo or disco. Not that I'm complaining.

I doubt it's going away anytime soon. They're pretty clearly taking time to recalibrate, which, is absolutely the right move.

It's not just superhero fatigue that is the problem. The film industry (and Disney in particular) have been making catastrophic financial and business decisions for years now and they're only now starting to bite them.

For one, they've deliberately destroyed physical media and rentals with their streaming service strategies, which makes it nearly impossible for movies to make money outside of theaters, but they've also been attempting to destroy movie theaters with their streaming services. This has been done by releasing theatrical films onto streaming the same day as their debut, or only waiting three or four weeks to dump them onto streaming. This is a problem because it is not possible to make a profit on streaming services when you're producing your own films and shows. If people aren't paying to buy or rent your film, and there are no ads being run, then you aren't making any money. Go f-cking figure. There is no world in which a season of She-Hulk will draw enough Disney+ subscribers to earn back the 500 million dollars it costs to make that one single product. It's total voodoo economics.

Another problem is that they, and Disney in particular, have totally failed to build anything resembling a new IP over the past ten years. They've just flooded the market (like never before in the history of cinema) with superhero crap. Once they exhausted the recognizable characters they started relying on D-listers. And since theaters are the only way to make money now thanks to their disastrous streaming model, every movie has to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and every movie has to make a billion dollars to be considered a success, and they have to do it in a shorter amount of time too because more "content" as they like to call it is constantly being produced, which also results in these 500-600 million dollar monstrosities being indistinguishable from each other.

[DaleCooper]

Go f-cking figure. There is no world in which a season of She-Hulk will draw enough Disney+ subscribers to earn back the 500 million dollars it costs to make that one single product.

Jesus effing Christ! Where do you get these numbers from, George Santos? 

That was a guess based on how much this crap usually costs. A good rule of thumb is to take the stated budget and double it to get a rough estimate of how much it costs to produce and market something. I looked it up and She-Hulk had a budget of 225 million (which is actually less than I expected though in my defense I thought the episodes were an hour long, not 30 minutes), so I'd say 400 million would be a fair estimate assuming they spent less on marketing than they would for a Marvel movie. Since it was dumped onto Disney+ it has made zero dollars. What a success!

[DaleCooper]

Something else I forgot to mention is that the streaming model is even less viable now that the strikes have forced the studios to actually pay their people. Not only will they earn zero dollars from the movies and shows they put on their streaming services, but they also have to pay royalties to the people who actually created them. The studios' response to this problem will be to cut corners and make even worse "content" (again, their word) as part of their ongoing effort to destroy their own industry.

[DaleCooper]

That was a guess based on how much this crap usually costs. A good rule of thumb is to take the stated budget and double it to get a rough estimate of how much it costs to produce and market something. I looked it up and She-Hulk had a budget of 225 million (which is actually less than I expected though in my defense I thought the episodes were an hour long, not 30 minutes), so I'd say 400 million would be a fair estimate assuming they spent less on marketing than they would for a Marvel movie. Since it was dumped onto Disney+ it has made zero dollars. What a success!

No, your assumptions are wildly inaccurate. Even the biggest theatrical releases don't spend 175 millions on marketing. And you can't compare spending 200 million dollars on a two hour movie with spending the same amount on a TV series whose total runtime is 5-6 hours. If you can't understand the difference because you have a hate-boner for Disney then this conversation just goes nowhere.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Even if they only spent 75 million on marketing for She-Hulk, it is still failing to make any of that back. There is no way to spin any of this crap as successful. There is no way that enough people are watching She-Hulk with ads running to make back all that money.

[DaleCooper]

You are missing the forest for the trees. Even if they only spent 75 million on marketing for She-Hulk, it is still failing to make any of that back. There is no way to spin any of this crap as successful. There is no way that enough people are watching She-Hulk with ads running to make back all that money.

Something else I forgot to mention is that the streaming model is even less viable now that the strikes have forced the studios to actually pay their people. Not only will they earn zero dollars from the movies and shows they put on their streaming services, but they also have to pay royalties to the people who actually created them. The studios' response to this problem will be to cut corners and make even worse "content" (again, their word) as part of their ongoing effort to destroy their own industry.

You really have no idea what you're talking about. I might as well start writing about baseball.

P.S. She-Hulk was one of the biggest successes of Disney+ when it comes to viewership.

Nope.

[DaleCooper]

If there's one thing the manosphere dudebros do seem to be right about it's that Marvel is trying to replace every single character with a young girl who acquires all the powers and knowledge with zero effort and just seems to immediately be an expert on how to utilize those powers.  And that Marvel usually drives this point home by making her smarter and better than the original superhero, often emphasized with a scene between the two where she condescendingly proves her superiority over him.  I find these scenes not just annoying but also predictable.  But I'm more annoyed that these characters often seem as little more than advertisements for TV shows.

That's the same BS these cousin-humping, mouth-breathing, racist troglodytes were saying about Rey in the Star Wars sequels, being a Mary Sue and what.
And that's why I'll ask somebody to give me a specific example of an MCU project where that happened because I can't recall.

The Force Awakens was widely popular when it came out among the fandom and people were extremely hyped up for the Last Jedi. What made people really dislike Rey and the ST in general was how much the Last Jedi utterly wrecked the storyline, lore, and failed to create any sort of coherent arc for the main characters whatsoever and then overtime people started to realize The Force Awakens helped cause a lot of the problems that were


Also the new character most of the fans were excited to see was not a while male but Finn and fans were extremely disappointed to see how his character was treated in TLJ and TROS.

The Force Awakens was, ironically, exactly what the fat gen-Xers who whined about the prequels for 15 years wanted from a Star Wars film. Light sabers, fan service, storm troopers, JJ Abrams nothingness. The Last Jedi is a trainwreck, but at least 50% of that is the fault of it being forced to follow a complete nothing movie like the Force Awakens. I am glad that people are coming around to realizing how awful it was, but there was no excuse for liking that crap from the beginning. Force Awakens' success is why we've gotten so many terrible remake/reboot sequels over the last several years.

[DaleCooper]

It's funny to see them running away from their own story with Snow White. They're leaving behind the seven dwarfs because they don't want to employ short people. The whole romance with the prince is probably gone because that's offensive. I'm sure there'll be an epic battle scene at the end where Snow White runs around with a sword doing something stupid. I can't imagine many people wanting to see it.