After 'Superman' Scores $400M Globally, How Will Marvel Respond? (yahoo.com) 69
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige "isn't interested in your theories of superhero fatigue, which he doesn't buy as real," writes The Hollywood Reporter. Feige points to the $400 million worldwide box office for Superman (which another article notes in only its second weekend "has already passed up the entire lifetime run of Marvel's Thunderbolts*.")
So how is Marvel moving forward? Yes, Feige knows Marvel made too many movies and shows (and the other things they did wrong). From the first Iron Man in 2008 through Avengers: Endgame in 2019, Marvel produced around 50 hours of screen storytelling. In the six years since Endgame, the number jumps to an astounding 102 hours of movies and television. 127 hours if you include animation. "That's too much," Feige said.
He characterized the time period after Endgame as an era of experimentation, evolution and, unfortunately, expansion. And while he's proud of the experimentation — he points to WandaVision and Loki as some of the best stories they've made — he admits "It's the expansion that is certainly what devalued" that output. Being high on success also may have pushed them to readily agree to try to deliver more programming at a time when Disney and the rest of Hollywood were engaged in the streaming wars. "It was a big company push... [T]here was a mandate that we were put in the middle of, but we also thought it'd be fun to bring these to life."
Marvel has already pulled back the amount of movies and shows it will make. Some years may even only have one movie. Certainly there will be years with only one show released. Also, Marvel has started "grinding down" on budgets, with movies costing up to a third cheaper than the films from 2022 or 2023.
Feige also explains why Thunderbolts* struggled at the box office (even though he's called it a "very, very good movie"). The massive expansion into television and focus on Disney+ led to the feeling that watching Marvel was becoming a type of homework. "It's that expansion that I think led people to say, 'Do I have to see all of these? It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?' And I think The Marvels hit it hardest where people are like, 'Okay, I recognize her from a billion dollar movie. But who are those other two? I guess they were in some TV show. I'll skip it.'" Which had an effect on Thunderbolts*, which featured characters that were seen on various platforms, including some only on shows.
The article notes Friday's release of Fantastic Four: First Steps is Marvel Studios' first crack at the characters after "a trio of movies of various quality and box office made by Twentieth Century Fox before its 2019 acquisition by Disney." And the article also acknowledges "the never-released, 1994 feature produced low-budget king Roger Corman. (Fun fact: the four stars of that movie cameo in Fantastic Four: First Steps.)"
So how is Marvel moving forward? Yes, Feige knows Marvel made too many movies and shows (and the other things they did wrong). From the first Iron Man in 2008 through Avengers: Endgame in 2019, Marvel produced around 50 hours of screen storytelling. In the six years since Endgame, the number jumps to an astounding 102 hours of movies and television. 127 hours if you include animation. "That's too much," Feige said.
He characterized the time period after Endgame as an era of experimentation, evolution and, unfortunately, expansion. And while he's proud of the experimentation — he points to WandaVision and Loki as some of the best stories they've made — he admits "It's the expansion that is certainly what devalued" that output. Being high on success also may have pushed them to readily agree to try to deliver more programming at a time when Disney and the rest of Hollywood were engaged in the streaming wars. "It was a big company push... [T]here was a mandate that we were put in the middle of, but we also thought it'd be fun to bring these to life."
Marvel has already pulled back the amount of movies and shows it will make. Some years may even only have one movie. Certainly there will be years with only one show released. Also, Marvel has started "grinding down" on budgets, with movies costing up to a third cheaper than the films from 2022 or 2023.
Feige also explains why Thunderbolts* struggled at the box office (even though he's called it a "very, very good movie"). The massive expansion into television and focus on Disney+ led to the feeling that watching Marvel was becoming a type of homework. "It's that expansion that I think led people to say, 'Do I have to see all of these? It used to be fun, but now do I have to know everything about all of these?' And I think The Marvels hit it hardest where people are like, 'Okay, I recognize her from a billion dollar movie. But who are those other two? I guess they were in some TV show. I'll skip it.'" Which had an effect on Thunderbolts*, which featured characters that were seen on various platforms, including some only on shows.
The article notes Friday's release of Fantastic Four: First Steps is Marvel Studios' first crack at the characters after "a trio of movies of various quality and box office made by Twentieth Century Fox before its 2019 acquisition by Disney." And the article also acknowledges "the never-released, 1994 feature produced low-budget king Roger Corman. (Fun fact: the four stars of that movie cameo in Fantastic Four: First Steps.)"
Thunderbolts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thunderbolts was stupid, not a "very, very good movie".
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I like most of Marvel's superhero movies. This one, not so much. To each his/her own I guess. I see I've already been down voted so perhaps I'm in the minority.
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I like most of Marvel's superhero movies. This one, not so much. To each his/her own I guess. I see I've already been down voted so perhaps I'm in the minority.
Aside from Deadpool & Wolverine, this one was my favorite in the last two phases. Black Widow was also very good, but... hey... there's Florence Pugh as her character from this one, so... that scans.
What I liked about this one - which was deliberately silly and light-hearted - was that it was personal. The stakes and the challenges were about what mattered to these characters and their doubts and weaknesses and traumas. Yes, the big bad was hurting other people, but it was mostly about the main cas
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I respectfully disagree. You may have elements of the movie you like, but that doesn't make it a good movie. To be clear a good movie could be written precise preserving the elements you like (and I want to see that movie).
What makes the movie *objectively* a bad movie is its story telling, not the story itself, but the way it is told and presented. An insane amount of screentime is wasted in the movie. You say it is "personal"? Well that "personal" mission doesn't actually start until after 1hour into the
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I'd rate Thunderbolts a solid B. It wasn't exceptional, the stakes were nothing new or particularly interesting. I think it also suffered from Bucky and John Walker being under-developed, especially Walker. A potentially interesting character, but the product of a pretty poor TV show.
Mostly though the issue is that they just aren't a very compelling bunch. If you contrast it with Superman, Gunn took that character and really explored how a man with god-like powers and that somewhat simplistic morality he is
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Thunderbolts was okay.
For me, the test will be if I decide to rewatch it in a few months or even a year. Right now... maybe? It was kinda funny and had a few good scenes.
Frankly a lot of stuff Marvel has put out recently is not re-watch worthy for me. That includes most of the MCU TV shows.
I will rewatch Agents of SHIELD and Legion. I will rewatch all the Avengers films and the second and third Thor movies, the Marvels, and (of course) the first three Captain America movies.
I guess when there are a lot
Re: Thunderbolts? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it was better than most of the previous Avengers movies. It didn't degenerate into cartoons punching each other for 20 minutes as a so-called "climax" like every other Marvel movie.
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It had humor, it had a plot, it didn't end with a big CGI 'vs nega' crapfest fight.
It was good enough for me to say that it was an improvement over simply more of the same.
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It had humour, but it didn't have a plot. Or rather the plot didn't drive the movie in any way. Characters just sort of stumbled into the plot here and there. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. Props for not ending the way Avengers did, but it completely lacked any of the stakes the Avengers movie had. So while the latter ended poorly, at least it kept me engaged.
Even a McGuffin would have been better placed in this movie to give people something to strive towards.
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Re: Thunderbolts? (Score:3)
The most egregious example is the Green Lantern stuff where this guy can pretty create anything with his magic ring and all he can think to do is create a giant green fist to punch people.
That's next level bad writing.
But yeah, wizards in Marvel just vogue and throw up gang signs for a moment before two light beams crash into each other and then they grunt Dragon Ball Z style until one light beam slowly moves all the way to the other wizard.
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So you DON'T want superheroes? Because for almost a hundred years that IS what superheroes are about.
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Thunderbolts? Literally never heard of it.
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Re: Thunderbolts? (Score:2)
I think I'm this case you are probably better if trying to compare it to what its trying to be (with movies in the same genre) rather than the other movies the marvel universe.
The peer would be The Suicide Squad. I actually quite liked that, but I didn't need all of the R rated material
I'm hoping David Harbor eventually gets some successful movies. He just hasn't had the luck outside of Stranger Things.
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Who cares (Score:2, Informative)
Re:DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY -- no spoliers (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, the fine words of someone that wanted a movie that spent half its runtime retelling Superman's origin story, and the other half rehashing a specific comic book word for word.
Interesting you have so much to say about a movie you watched one quarter of.
"making his home an environmental complaint" - What?
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Maybe not, but they didn't need to basically copy Goku's origin story from Dragonball Z.
Or the Invincible comic. The fact that Invincible is an active series on Amazon makes it worse.
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... and making his home an environmental complaint.
That was in the Supergirl TV series too and I didn't like it. In the Supergirl universe (later incorporated into the larger "Arrowverse") the planet of Krypton exploded because the people on the planet where using the planet's core as an energy source, and somehow this induced an instability that destroyed the planet. Or at least that's what I recall. Did the new Superman film use the same premise?
I'm generally not a fan of the DC universe because so much of the story behind the characters depend on fic
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When these comics were first invented, it was common in literature to use placeholders even for people, eg "Johnny Everyman". It's an outdated practice, but DC is stuck with the naming of those cities.
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Remember that a majority of US voters voted for Donald Trump.
I guess MAGA folks have a problem with math. Somehow 49.8% is a majority in MAGA math. ... talking about alternative virtual universes ...
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The results are debatable. Something fishy was going on in some states. For example EVERY SINGLE swing state suddenly went hard-core MAGA. Doesn't make any sense.
Voter suppression was off the charts. Those are votes that were thrown out which bizarrely were mostly in Left leaning areas of the states, funny how that works.
The Left doesn't want to talk about it because then they would be doing what the Orange Menace did in 2020. Well, except there is a chance they would not be lying.
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"Plurality" isn't as sexy to say even though that very fact of American elections is what got Trump the nom in 2016, get pluralities in a divided field.
I don't think Trump has taken an actual majority in many elections, primary or general.
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"Plurality" isn't as sexy to say even though that very fact of American elections is what got Trump the nom in 2016, get pluralities in a divided field.
I don't think Trump has taken an actual majority in many elections, primary or general.
Trump has competed in three presidential general elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024 and received 46.2%, 46.9%, and 49.8% of the votes cast, respectively. Trump didn't even get a plurality of the popular vote in 2016, trailing 46.2% to Clinton's 48.2%. Of course, Trump also didn't get a plurality in 2020, when he lost 46.9% to Biden's 51.3%. 2024 was the only election where Trump achieved a plurality, 49.8% to Harris' 48.3%.
It's harder to count popular votes in primaries because the elections don't happen
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I just remember in the early states of the 2016 Primary that Trump would win with like 28% of the vote
Re:I agree with the "homework" commentary. (Score:4, Funny)
His rice is pretty tasty.
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What I didn't like about the MCU was that too much of each movie depended on seeing many of the prior movies in the series. Then comes if I did see a movie that was referenced but there was some inconsistency (likely because some screenwriter or director failed to do their own homework) then I was taken out of the movie, losing that suspension of disbelief required to to be sucked into a fictional world, and that made the movie less enjoyable.
Then is the tactic of some of what might be considered the "side projects" in the MCU, typically the TV and web series, where the story ends as status quo ante which makes me feel like I wasted my time on homework that wasn't going to be on the final exam. To make a status quo ante story worth watching requires that the story be very good, and that's hard to do when dealing with multiple writers, directors, and actors which can introduce some contradiction later. It's difficult to write an enjoyable story where the characters can't develop or learn something as it could pose some threat to the enjoyment of another story later in the series.
It's fun to see these side projects develop into Easter eggs on the big screen for those that did do their homework but that can also mean there's no "big reveal" later on since they already tipped their hand to that segment of the audience.
What also took me out of the stories the MCU told was how much the world on the screen deviated from the world I was living in. I found the early Marvel movies enjoyable because it was a world much like my own, with real cities and such that I can find on a map (unlike the DC universe), and involving some real world events at times. That connection to the real world faded with each new movie in the series, and it quickly turned into something as foreign and mythical as something from JRR Tolkien or CS Lewis. There's nothing wrong with creating some new world with near omnipotent beings battling it out in a classic good vs. evil fashion. Where I'm lost is this this is somehow still supposed to be connected to the here and now on planet Earth.
Perhaps the biggest problem in the MCU is that dead people don't stay dead. Well, except Uncle Ben, he always dies. With alternative universes, and time travel, there's an even greater loss on who is who, what happened in a previous story, more status quo ante imposed to make prior homework seem like a waste of time, and so on.
Maybe there is a balance that can be found between the stand-alone stories like in the beginning and the epic team-up stories near the end. I haven't watched a movie in the MCU for a while so maybe they figured that out and I didn't notice.
Requoted against the censor moderation. Offended fanbois? Tribal defensiveness?
I actually thought it was an informative post--but that just shows how long it's been since I read any of those comic books or saw any of those movies... I think I was given a free ticket to one of the first recent series of Spiderman movies, so maybe 20 years ago?
By the way, this might be a funny coincidence: Just reading a genre history of western-style mysteries in Japan. One of the big authors, Edogawa Ranpo, actually wrote a
How Will Marvel Respond? (Score:5, Insightful)
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In other words flooding the market with yet more comic book movies
It hasn't made a "profit" yet (Score:4, Interesting)
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Is that a real profit or just Hollywood accounting?
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Is that a real profit or just Hollywood accounting?
At $500m they've already made money, although the accountants will make it look like it's still losing money after $3 billion.
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The movie theaters keep about 50% of the money. If the movie makes $700 million, the studio only gets $350 million. In addition, they rarely disclose marketing costs, but are significant.
Hence, the break-even number is much higher than what the movie costs to make.
That said, they also make money on merch, streaming, amusement parks, or any other way they can milk it.
We end up with some wishy washy numbers that don't tell the complete story.
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They already have a response (Score:2)
Since they bought Fox now after 30 years the XMen license is back in their hands. That's already in motion so there is an entire hype cycle there to churn before they have to think about responding.
As far as my opinion what Marvel is missing right now are any actual "auteur" directors. It's pretty well known Marvel is a machine and directors only get so much input. Here at least Gunn is a director with his own vision and it seems like he was able to execute on it.
No offense to Matt Shakman who is directin
How will Marvel respobd? (Score:2)
elephant in the room: no one CARES about unknowns (Score:2)
Nobody cares about Moon Knight (my favorite character for a number of reasons) or a young female archer or a native american chick with difficult-to-describe powers (she channels the chi of her ancestors?). I mean, I was thrilled to see Moon Knight portrayed on any screen, because he's so WEIRD: Marvel's Batman, except he wears white not black, except he's also a cabby, and his powers wane under a new moon, and some of his stories are downright gritty: dealing with mental illness, painkiller addiction, and
Check out the cognitive dissonance on this guy... (Score:3)
Yes there is fatigue (Score:4)
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+1 since I don't have mod points.
I've definitely got "super hero fatigue". Don't think I've seen a SH (super hero) movie since Black Widow, and if it wasn't for Scarlet I probably wouldn't have seen that one. :) All of the major characters have been done; everyone else is so minor I don't care (yeah, I'm not a big comic book guy). I've seen too many "reboot/origin" of the same SH character to see another one. Feige should face the facts, some characters like Superman are always going to do well; acknowledge
Riding on name recognition (Score:3)
Pander harder (Score:2)
Put a chick in it.
Make her gay.
Make it lame. Really, really lame.
Focus on big legacy characters (Score:1)
I donâ(TM)t think superhero fatigue is really a thing, I think that Marvel just needs to focus on the big legacy characters. Everything started to fall apart post-Endgame when most stories were about side characters that â" guess what â" donâ(TM)t have a big fan base or general public name recognition.
Pre-Endgame almost everything was big name Avengers. (Guardians of the Galaxy was the only exception, and those did well, but I think that was just because the movies were so weird compar
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Yes, super hero fatigue is real. I'm tired of them. I don't know what Marvel could produce that would make me want to go see more of their movies; they've existed all of the obviously interesting characters.
You're correct they need to focus on the "big names", but even then, they're over to me and I don't want to see more reboot/origin stories to introduce a new actor. No, I won't be going see the new F4 movie; I thought the last one was good enough (which may indicate that I've never found the F4 all that
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The success of the recent Superman appears to prove you wrong. Tell a good story and people will go to see it. It's not super hero fatigue that's real...it's that the storywriting has suffered, and they're pulling from deeper B and C list superheroes that don't have the same kind of appeal.
Respond? Do not respond. (Score:2)
Part of the reason the comic book movie subgenre that seemed to have taken over the blockbuster for a while is such a mess is that the studios feel the need to respond to one another instead of tell interesting, or at least fun, stories involving compelling characters. DC so desperately wants a Marvelverse style "gotta catch 'em all" thing that when they don't achieve it instantly they press the reset button, thus guaranteeing they'll never have a Marvelverse style "gotta catch 'em all" universe. Meanwhile,
superman (Score:2)
Why does Marvel need to respond? (Score:2)
What they don't seem to understand (Score:3)
The problem that Marvel has isn't "too much content", the problem is too much interconnected content. When you are interested in a movie, but you are afraid that because you haven't watched EVERY Marvel movie over the past three years that you won't understand some of what is going on. That reduces the number of people looking to watch the new movie.
Now, if every Avengers movie didn't require that you have watched all of the other movies to understand what is going on, that would fix much of the "fatigue" that people have. Make the individual series more self encapsulated. Or make it very clear which movies you need to have seen so the audience knows what they should see before the new movie.
In comics, you don't need to know what is going on within the entire universe to enjoy the character(s) you want to follow, but Marvel made it so you almost feel pressured into having seen EVERYTHING to understand a bunch of what is going on.
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Subject Doesn't Matter (Score:2)
Make better films. I don't care what they are about, or who the characters are. MAKE GOOD FILMS. Who are these idiots who think they have to see a film because it's "MCU?" Tell me who the director is. Who the screenwriter is. How dedicated the actors are. Will the producers let them create art or hamstring them to just repeat the last film that made money. I know it's not easy to make good films. I'm just saying stick with THAT as the reason to do all the work, spend all the money, and let people s
Try getting an original character for once. (Score:2)
Remake / Reboot / sequel sequel sequel. I don't mind sequels really until they prequel and reboot - that's just money grubbing lame.