I don't talk much about Marvel/Disney any longer because it's no longer relevant. It had its chance to course correct; it did not. It cannot be saved and no one even cares that it's dying any longer.
Tickets went on sale for Captain America: Brave New World on Friday. The movie does not feature Steve Rogers, but the Falcon taking over the role so that Marvel can say "We're so progressive we have a Black Captain America now."
Ticket sales aren't great:
Fernando
@Luiz_Fernando_J
And yeah, #CaptainAmerica: #BraveNewWorld had its pre-sales kickoff on FRI at US #BoxOffice!
After 2 days of pre-sales, although nowhere near #Quantumania which opened on the same weekend in 2023, #CaptainAmericaBraveNewWorld is currently 1.4x better than #TheMarvels & #JokerFolieADeux, on par with #Eternals & not that far from #BlackWidow & #DunePartTwo after their first 2 days of pre-sales.
Quantumania was itself a bomb, and The Marvels and Joker 2 were huge bombs. Eternals was a bomb -- and it was released when theaters were still recovering from covid.
By the way, due to extensive and repeated reshoots, required due to poor test screenings, the cost of just filming this piece of crap is estimated at $350 million.
Some are saying it would have to make $900 million or a billion before it begins actually making money.
The latest box office update for Captain America: Brave New World spells all-too-familiar trouble for Marvel Studios, as presale tickets are tracking just 1.4 times better than The Marvels and on par with The Eternals. While this may sound like a slight improvement on paper, it's a significant red flag for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
A Troubling Comparison to The Eternals
Released in 2021, The Eternals marked Marvel's first major financial failure, grossing just $164.9 million domestically and $237.2 million internationally for a worldwide total of $402 million.
The Eternals had a production budget of $236.2 million.
Brave New World faces a much steeper climb. With a rumored production budget between $350 and $375 million--over $100 million more than The Eternals at the lowest projection--this film could become a far bigger bomb even if it performs similarly at the box office. After factoring in marketing costs, which often equal the production budget, and theater cuts of ticket sales, the movie would need to exceed $900 million globally to break even according to some projections.
Based on current reports, Brave New World is unlikely to hit that target.
Box Office Projections Confirm the Decline
As previously reported, opening weekend projections for Brave New World are estimated to land between $81 million and $107 million with a median figure of $96 million. Many outlets are quick to point out that the film is tracking similarly to 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as if that's a positive.
It's not.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier opened domestically at $95 million and grossed $259.7 million at home. Adjusted for inflation, The Winter Soldier's opening weekend climbs to $126.6 million and its domestic haul to $356 million--both far beyond what Brave New World is tracking to achieve.
Even worse, ticket prices have increased dramatically since 2014, when the average movie ticket was $8.14. Now, with an average ticket price of $10.78, even matching The Winter Soldier's $95 million opening weekend would mean far fewer people are watching Brave New World.
These numbers paint a dire picture for the once-reliable Captain America franchise.
Don't worry: Marvel has a HUGE selling point for this movie. You see, this movie will be the debut of the famous Marvel character Red Hulk.
Who's Red Hulk, you ask? Well he was made up in the past 10 or 12 years. You see, he's just like the Hulk, except, and this is gonna blow your mind, he's... Red. And he's violent and destructive. (You know -- like the actual Hulk.)
Are you excited now? They did a color swap on The Hulk!
Oh, and even better, people say that this Red Hulk is in the movie for "about five minutes."
Marvel could have just re-cast Iron Man and Captain America. Just like the James Bond series did. The James Bond people didn't say, "Oh, Sean Connery is retiring, let's have a black agent, 009, take over for him." No, they just recast, because the character was key.
Marvel has been pushing a woke agenda. They are very embarrassed that most of their most popular characters, created in decades past before we realized that Diversity is Our Strength and the country was 75%+ white, were white.
So Marvel attempted in the comics -- where it failed -- and then in the movies -- where it's failing now -- to implement the "Mantle Strategy." The theory was, it's not the characters who matter, it's just the mantle. The superhero identity. The costume. We can just replace all of our old, unfashionable white characters with race-and-genderswapped replacements. As long as they're wearing the old costume, the audience will never notice the difference.
So the "All New All Different" era replaced Bruce Banner with Amadeus Cho, a teenage Asian, and called it "Totally Awesome Hulk." (No, really, google it.) Iron Man was replaced with a black teenage girl genius (of course) called "Iron Heart." Sam Wilson, the Falcon, took over as Captain America.
Etc., etc., etc.
Like I said, Marvel already ran this experiment, and it failed. Bigtime. Customers rejected the "Mantle Strategy."
But Kevin Fiege is a stupid, weak liberal manlet who was convinced I can make it work. I am the True White Savior.
Nope!
Meanwhile, Hollywood is burning and I don't just mean literally.
Hollywood Braces for a 'Masks Off' Trump Era "There's more fear in the executive suites now than there ever has been."
When Donald Trump emerged with raised fist from 2024's never-ending cortisol blast of an election last year, liberal-leaning Hollywood responded to the news with questions. Following a wave of predictably anguished celebrity tweets, the first was: What does this mean for our bottom line? The second: How do we make Trump 2.0 work in our favor?
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Now, with the arrival of the 45th president's re-inauguration as POTUS 47, most movie-business insiders are hunched in a crash position alongside Disney executives. After facing a pandemic and twin Hollywood strikes, the inhabitants of the Thirty-Mile Zone know sweeping change is coming, even if the precise shape and scope is uncertain. Sources I consulted, ranging from studio executives to hitmaking producers and high-level talent managers as well as on-set crew members (most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity), predict Hollywood will generally become more self-censoring and less capable of critiquing the current political moment, if not less influential overall.
"Hollywood doesn't matter as much as it thinks it matters," says a talent manager with A-list clients. "You had the biggest stars in the world support Kamala Harris. She couldn't have drawn more powerful advocates. And it didn't move the needle. What does that tell you? It's unsettling because the people and things you hold in high esteem don't drive the culture. As much as I love movies, they aren't the driver anymore."
Will any "culture of resistance" (as when United Talent Agency organized a celeb-packed rally to protest the so-called Muslim ban in 2017) persist? One corporate strategist with interests across film and television described the feeling around town as "preemptive exhaustion." Hollywood is plagued by a sense of doom precipitated not just by financial anxieties but a feeling that a pervasive "woke is broke" mindset will affect what we see on our screens in the coming years
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"The movement away from 'woke' was already in motion even before Trump got re-elected," says a blockbuster producer, who points to two of the three movies in the last Star Wars trilogy (The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker) and several recent Marvel movies (Eternals, The Marvels), all of which underperformed at the box office, backdropped by a din of fanboy complaints about "forced diversity." "We've been seeing the departure of executives at the studios that had been hired to promote DEI in film and TV. Hollywood had swung too far left over the past few years and there was bound to be a reckoning."
Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump's reelection comes at the tail end of a year when the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion--bashing Am I Racist?, produced by the Daily Wire, prevailed as 2024's highest-grossing documentary. (Shortly after Participant Media -- the production company known for tough-minded, issue-driven docs like The Cove and An Inconvenient Truth -- abruptly shuttered.) 2024 was also the year Twisters achieved blockbusterdom with a pronounced red-state aesthetic breaking through with audiences in the middle and southern portions of the U.S. Yet it would be a mistake to expect a right-wing reboot entirely. To hear it from several studio and production-company bosses, overt politics simply don't sell. "There isn't a strong desire for rhetorical storytelling in Hollywood," says one production exec. "In certain corners of the entertainment world, there's suddenly this opportunity for conservative-minded viewers to see a bit of their world represented. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be a flip to the other side of the equation."
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In a more pressing example of what's to come in 2025, there is Marvel's Captain: America: Brave New World, which before June 2023 was titled Captain America: New World Order. (The change was taken as an implicit response to the IRL "New World Order" conspiracy theory gaining traction in right-wing extremist corners of the internet; it posits the existence of a secret global elite conspiring to implement a totalitarian one-world government.) Early test screenings of Brave New World, which hits theaters February 14, were reportedly disastrous, prompting expensive reshoots with major sequences cut from the film. According to a technical crew member on the film with knowledge of both the screenings and the reshoot process (which also took place last year), the character portrayed by Harrison Ford -- Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, a demagogic military leader who morphs into an irrational, orange-hued superhuman -- created unforeseen political resonances for the studio in an inaugural year.
"He's this very powerful general who becomes kind of a fascist and turns into a raging Red Hulk. That was seen as an allusion to Trump," this source explains. "Disney was realizing, Hey, we've been bleeding for a while. Let's try not to piss off our core base anymore than we have been over the past couple of years."
Are you psyched about Red Hulk yet, bigots?
I've been hearing that the test screenings went poorly due to one particular plot point, which they've reshot the movie to avoid. They might have taken out President Red Hulk's imposition of a fascist dictatorship.
Or maybe they didn't. Who cares? I'm not going to watch it.