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

[Landslide Lyndon]

Nope.

Yeah.

https://fandomwire.com/she-hulk-reveals-impressive-viewership-record-despite-negative-online-hate-comfortably-beats-most-disney-shows-including-ms-marvel/

https://www.cbr.com/she-hulk-mcu-hot-doubles-ms-marvel-audience/

[GeneralMacArthur]

I feel like just in general there's been a pretty noticeable drop-off in film quality since Endgame that's predicated on a few different issues:

1:  A lot of the big stars are gone.  Robert Downey Jr. was the heart of this franchise and it just doesn't feel the same without him.  Chris Evans was absolutely vital as the centerpiece of the Avengers who drove the plots.  Chadwick Boseman is of course a tremendous loss for the studio.  Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner and ScarJo were less vital but are also good actors (Ruffalo declined over time) who were usually enjoyable to watch on-screen in their secondary roles.

2:  In lieu of those actors, Marvel has tried to replace them, but the replacements haven't been very good.  Sometimes this is the fault of the actors but more often it's the fault of the writing or just weak characterization.  They tried to replace RDJ's Iron Man with Dominique Thorne's Riri Williams, who was just awful.  They tried to replace Chris Evans with Anthony Mackie's Falcon, who is alright but he's not a valid replacement for Captain America for heaven's sake.  They tried to replace Mark Ruffalo with... She-Hulk?  IDK didn't watch the show.  Also didn't watch the Hawkeye show but I heard Hailee Steinfeld as the new Hawkeye is meh.  Letitia Wright's Shuri is of course nowhere near a legitimate replacement for Chadwick Boseman.  And they're even trying to replace Ant Man with his daughter who was a very obnoxious character.

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.

3:  The production quality of these movies has just gotten really poor.  Where is the money being spent?  The CGI looks absolutely dreadful half the time and the music (I love a good film score) has become generic and unmemorable.  It feels like Disney is just churning these out so quickly that there's no time to refine them into good movies, and everyone involved knows it so there's no passion and little effort.

4:  A lot of the writing for these movies is just stupid.  Like even putting aside the above issues they are just plain bad movies a lot of the time and would have been bad even with fantastic acting, well-developed characters and stellar production.  Ant Man: Quantumania, for instance, brought back an old dead antagonist who had his face stretched out on a killing machine (this looks absolutely dreadful btw) and in the climax of the movie, he's about to kill Ant-Man's daughter when she tells him "hey, don't be a dick."  That's all it takes to change his mind.  Then a few minutes later, Kang is about to kill Ant-Man, and he flies in shouting "I am not a dick!" and suicide-bombs himself into Kang.  And that's supposed to be the epic climax of the film.  How you gonna compare this to Goodfellas?  Can you blame Scorsese for being salty that people are choosing to waste 126 minutes of their life watching this crap instead of a quality movie?  They only get away with it because they get compared to other MCU movies instead of other real movies.

[Rand]

How about A Carol Danvers Thanksgiving? Instead of tackling supervillains, Captain Marvel tackles something a little more on her level...a turkey! Marvel as Miss Danvers roasts the perfect bird for her family. Not all heroes wear capes...some wear aprons instead.

[John Dule]

4:  A lot of the writing for these movies is just stupid.  Like even putting aside the above issues they are just plain bad movies a lot of the time and would have been bad even with fantastic acting, well-developed characters and stellar production.  Ant Man: Quantumania, for instance, brought back an old dead antagonist who had his face stretched out on a killing machine (this looks absolutely dreadful btw) and in the climax of the movie, he's about to kill Ant-Man's daughter when she tells him "hey, don't be a dick."  That's all it takes to change his mind.  Then a few minutes later, Kang is about to kill Ant-Man, and he flies in shouting "I am not a dick!" and suicide-bombs himself into Kang.  And that's supposed to be the epic climax of the film.  How you gonna compare this to Goodfellas?  Can you blame Scorsese for being salty that people are choosing to waste 126 minutes of their life watching this crap instead of a quality movie?  They only get away with it because they get compared to other MCU movies instead of other real movies.

I laughed so hard reading this. I almost want to see this now.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I feel like just in general there's been a pretty noticeable drop-off in film quality since Endgame that's predicated on a few different issues:

1:  A lot of the big stars are gone.  Robert Downey Jr. was the heart of this franchise and it just doesn't feel the same without him.  Chris Evans was absolutely vital as the centerpiece of the Avengers who drove the plots.  Chadwick Boseman is of course a tremendous loss for the studio.  Mark Ruffalo, Jeremy Renner and ScarJo were less vital but are also good actors (Ruffalo declined over time) who were usually enjoyable to watch on-screen in their secondary roles.

2:  In lieu of those actors, Marvel has tried to replace them, but the replacements haven't been very good.  Sometimes this is the fault of the actors but more often it's the fault of the writing or just weak characterization.  They tried to replace RDJ's Iron Man with Dominique Thorne's Riri Williams, who was just awful.  They tried to replace Chris Evans with Anthony Mackie's Falcon, who is alright but he's not a valid replacement for Captain America for heaven's sake.  They tried to replace Mark Ruffalo with... She-Hulk?  IDK didn't watch the show.  Also didn't watch the Hawkeye show but I heard Hailee Steinfeld as the new Hawkeye is meh.  Letitia Wright's Shuri is of course nowhere near a legitimate replacement for Chadwick Boseman.  And they're even trying to replace Ant Man with his daughter who was a very obnoxious character.

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.

3:  The production quality of these movies has just gotten really poor.  Where is the money being spent?  The CGI looks absolutely dreadful half the time and the music (I love a good film score) has become generic and unmemorable.  It feels like Disney is just churning these out so quickly that there's no time to refine them into good movies, and everyone involved knows it so there's no passion and little effort.

4:  A lot of the writing for these movies is just stupid.  Like even putting aside the above issues they are just plain bad movies a lot of the time and would have been bad even with fantastic acting, well-developed characters and stellar production.  Ant Man: Quantumania, for instance, brought back an old dead antagonist who had his face stretched out on a killing machine (this looks absolutely dreadful btw) and in the climax of the movie, he's about to kill Ant-Man's daughter when she tells him "hey, don't be a dick."  That's all it takes to change his mind.  Then a few minutes later, Kang is about to kill Ant-Man, and he flies in shouting "I am not a dick!" and suicide-bombs himself into Kang.  And that's supposed to be the epic climax of the film.  How you gonna compare this to Goodfellas?  Can you blame Scorsese for being salty that people are choosing to waste 126 minutes of their life watching this crap instead of a quality movie?  They only get away with it because they get compared to other MCU movies instead of other real movies.

There's another big issue that dogged that one, and that's that Disney is basically expecting viewers to do "homework" on these movies now. This one was based not only on the first Captain Marvel and Avengers movies, but also three (3!) Disney+ serieses, not everyone has time to watch all of those or even wants to.

The key to having tie-in TV serieses to a movie franchise I think is more like those Netflix serieses that were probably the best thing the MCU has ever done, they were only loosely linked to the film series, which made sense because they were way more gritty and dark but also because if we were constantly reminded that Daredevil or Jessica Jones* is set in NYC in a universe where NYC also had an invasion and attack by aliens just a few years ago then the whole thing seems just weird, who cares about mobsters and low level criminals in a city that was literally attacked by aliens and have a good chunk of it destroyed**? So they just mostly kept that stuff out of focus even though it clearly wasn't our world, after all the heroes and some of the villains had superpowers and things like alien technology surfaced from time to time, but it all fit in the self-contained story. Having TV series directly linked the way Disney is doing it just doesn't work.

*It's worth noting that the first season of Jessica Jones has a very action-lite premise, the villain has no type of superhuman strength or invulnerability, he's just capable of forcing people to do his will, but Jessica is immune to that. So Jessica could simply easily kill him, and that's it. And yet that would be a short season, so they come up with excuses for Jessica to not kill him, and drag it out over 13 episodes...and yet it somehow still worked well!

**This is a common criticisms of The X-Files I think is valid too, a lot of the Villains of the Week just seemed so unimportant and trivial in comparison to the conspiracy and supposed incoming alien invasion or some of the other Monsters of the Week which a few times actually included Satan.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I think this also shows that the general public seems to agree with the consensus developing that the MCU had a logical end point when it should've ended, and that was Endgame, I mean just look at the title. Endgame even killed off the de facto protagonist! It wouldn't necessarily have to be complete end, like they could still do some epilogue-y TV series, maybe like a Spider-man series spinoff, and things like complete the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy because that was mostly a separate self-contained plot arc, but a full "Phase 5" like they're pushing now after the MCU's initial arc has already reached its logical conclusion is just not what people want.

[Landslide Lyndon]

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.

[John Dule]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

[GoTfan]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

There are a significant chunk of people in this world who simply hate the fact that this film is led by three women, one of them black and another a Pakistani-Canadian.

[John Dule]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

There are a significant chunk of people in this world who simply hate the fact that this film is led by three women, one of them black and another a Pakistani-Canadian.

... which is utterly irrelevant to MacArthur's substantive and specific criticism of the movie.

[Landslide Lyndon]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

There are a significant chunk of people in this world who simply hate the fact that this film is led by three women, one of them black and another a Pakistani-Canadian.

These people aren't even consistent. A lot of them liked "The Last Jedi" and "Captain Marvel" when they were first released, and there are videos to prove that.
But when they discovered that anti-wokeism, racism, and misogyny bring a ton of clicks from the incel crowd, they did a u-turn and suddenly started saying that these are the worst movies in the history of mankind, Hollywood is disrespecting straight white males, and that the woke virus is the biggest threat to our civilization.

[GeneralMacArthur]

4:  A lot of the writing for these movies is just stupid.  Like even putting aside the above issues they are just plain bad movies a lot of the time and would have been bad even with fantastic acting, well-developed characters and stellar production.  Ant Man: Quantumania, for instance, brought back an old dead antagonist who had his face stretched out on a killing machine (this looks absolutely dreadful btw) and in the climax of the movie, he's about to kill Ant-Man's daughter when she tells him "hey, don't be a dick."  That's all it takes to change his mind.  Then a few minutes later, Kang is about to kill Ant-Man, and he flies in shouting "I am not a dick!" and suicide-bombs himself into Kang.  And that's supposed to be the epic climax of the film.  How you gonna compare this to Goodfellas?  Can you blame Scorsese for being salty that people are choosing to waste 126 minutes of their life watching this crap instead of a quality movie?  They only get away with it because they get compared to other MCU movies instead of other real movies.

I laughed so hard reading this. I almost want to see this now.

Call Disney and ask how much they'll pay you to watch it.  Might as well get compensated if you're going to pump up their streaming numbers.

[Alben Barkley]

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.

And they were right about Rey too.

What I notice from fanboys like you who will defend whatever schlock Disney puts out is that rarely are you ever actually defending the quality of the film in question, let alone rebutting the actual arguments against it. Instead you're just launching ad hominem attacks against everyone who didn't like the film as racist/incel/Nazi/etc.* Almost like you don't actually like the movie really, you're just afraid to dislike it because of the perceived political implications. Well, some of us are unafraid to admit the emperor has no clothes.

*This despite the fact that in this most recent case, nearly two-thirds of the audience was male! It wasn't MEN who rejected The Marvels... Almost like superhero movies are in general more popular with men and you won't win over the female audience with lazy pandering. Almost like movies actually made for female tastes like Barbie will do much better with that demographic, especially when they're also just better made films.

[Landslide Lyndon]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

Nah, their main selling point is misogynism. That's why their Unholy Trinity of Wokeism is Ghostbusters 2016, the live-action Mulan, and Captain Marvel.

[John Dule]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

Nah, their main selling point is misogynism. That's why their Unholy Trinity of Wokeism is Ghostbusters 2016, the live-action Mulan, and Captain Marvel.

Huh? Mulan didn't race-swap or gender-swap the main character. People just hated it for the same reason they hate all those live-action Disney adaptations: they suck.

[Alben Barkley]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

Nah, their main selling point is misogynism. That's why their Unholy Trinity of Wokeism is Ghostbusters 2016, the live-action Mulan, and Captain Marvel.

Huh? Mulan didn't race-swap or gender-swap the main character. People just hated it for the same reason they hate all those live-action Disney adaptations: they suck.

Also as I understand it they cut out all the music and Mushu and basically the life in general from the film.

But no, I who as a kid who loved the animated Mulan despite its protagonist being an Asian woman, must actually be a racist sexist because I have no interest in watching a soulless Disney live-action remake.

[Landslide Lyndon]

Huh? Mulan didn't race-swap or gender-swap the main character. People just hated it for the same reason they hate all those live-action Disney adaptations: they suck.

Don't shoot the messenger. These folks say a lot of things that don't make sense.
Like I said, a few years ago they were big fans of movies which they now consider an affront to the human race.

[OSR stands with Israel]

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.

[GoTfan]

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.

racism is when u dont like moovie

There are a significant chunk of people in this world who simply hate the fact that this film is led by three women, one of them black and another a Pakistani-Canadian.

... which is utterly irrelevant to MacArthur's substantive and specific criticism of the movie.

And like I said, they're clearly pulling back and recalibrating. People pronouncing this 'The death of Marvel' are speaking way too son, I think.

[Landslide Lyndon]

And like I said, they're clearly pulling back and recalibrating. People pronouncing this 'The death of Marvel' are speaking way too son, I think.

Funnily all these incel losers who celebrate the death of Marvel had nothing to say about the second season of Loki. Isn't that weird?

[GoTfan]

And like I said, they're clearly pulling back and recalibrating. People pronouncing this 'The death of Marvel' are speaking way too son, I think.

Funnily all these incel losers who celebrate the death of Marvel had nothing to say about the second season of Loki. Isn't that weird?

You're not helping.

[Landslide Lyndon]

And like I said, they're clearly pulling back and recalibrating. People pronouncing this 'The death of Marvel' are speaking way too son, I think.

Funnily all these incel losers who celebrate the death of Marvel had nothing to say about the second season of Loki. Isn't that weird?

You're not helping.

I'm not here to help anybody. I'm saying my opinion.

[Sestak]

And like I said, they're clearly pulling back and recalibrating. People pronouncing this 'The death of Marvel' are speaking way too son, I think.

Speaking too late, arguably. As BRTD noted, every project since Endgame has been inextricably linked with the litany of Marvel made streaming shows; especially for the big crossover stuff now you need to follow like 4-5 seasons of televisions per year, plus four films each year. Pre-endgame it was two, sometimes three movies a year and that was it, and you could skip a lot of those. Even to watch this movie (which is not one of the big Avengers crossovers) now requires (probably) having watched the Captain Marvel film five years back, then to have watched the recent TV shows. It’s a fairly heavy prerequisite filing.

Sure, any proclamation of “death” is probably premature given Disney has unlimited money to try to keep it alive, but it’s certainly been set on the path to irrelevance for the past three to four years and the only thing that would change that would be a substantial rethinking of the business model they’ve invested into for the rest of this decade.

[Хahar 🤔]

Heh, I was just about to make a comment about how odd it is that when you go to Letterboxd and look up the top reviews for the new one, so many of them talk about "incels" as if this is a real group that exists as opposed to an imaginary bogeyman, but px saved us the trouble by doing it himself. On some level I feel bad for fans of comic book movies, because their thing went from being everywhere to being extremely uncool very quickly, but the constant resorts to bottom-barrel identity politics to assert that anyone who doesn't like comic book movies doesn't have sex and is therefore evil or whatever come across as ludicrous to anyone who isn't already converted.

To the actual point of this thread, people have brought up the issue of studios deciding to go all in on streaming (an example of the bizarre sort of decision-making that corporations were indulging in three years ago that would only make sense if they were of the belief that covid would last forever), but I would think that another factor would be the Chinese market. The reason that effects-heavy movies were everywhere in the 2010s was because the movie industry was looking to sell tickets in China, where culturally specific American stories play a lot worse than big explosions. Now the CCP doesn't want so many foreign movies and so a specific style of movie that was designed to play in China is a lot less lucrative.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I've never seen an episode of Loki and don't really have any interest in any MCU TV series besides those aforementioned Netflix ones and the first two of Agents of SHIELD, but season 2 has an 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and mass acclaim. "People don't complain as much about a highly acclaimed TV series season as a mediocre-received movie" isn't much of a shocking fact.

I'm not even seeing much complaining about this movie, just people saying they're not interested and thus don't plan on watching it.

Trying to blame it entirely on racism/sexism would only make sense if all movies with female leads or prominent non-white characters bomb, which obviously is not true. It's not even true for the MCU, seeing as how well the first Captain Marvel and Black Panther were. Black Widow also broke records for movies released during the pandemic. And Black Panther is not only the 17th highest grossing movie of all time, it's the highest grossing MCU movie that isn't an Avengers one other than Spider-Man: No Way Home (which is only fairly loosely linked to the MCU.) Meanwhile the most notable MCU bomb prior to this was Ant-Man 3, which starred a white male.