I mention her race and sexuality because it was believed these were armor that made her unfireable, no matter how poor her performance.
But when you start losing hundreds of millions of dollars -- or underpeforming by a couple of billion -- suddenly that armor starts looking thinner than it did before.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was Marvel's latest flop. Based on its opening of $120 million and using the 2.5x box office formula to predict its final global take, I said it would struggle to hit $500 million globally, even though I didn't really believe that.
And note that, despite being a flop -- Ant-Man 3 still outgrossed Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and The Eternals.
We'll start with the cold, hard facts. After four weeks in play, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has grossed $447.4 million worldwide, with $198.1 million coming from the US and $249.3 million coming from international markets.
Despite a US debut of $106.1 million, which set a new record for the franchise, Quantumania has yet to overtake the final hauls of Ant-Man ($518.9 million) and Ant-Man and the Wasp ($623.1 million). Neither of those movies was a big Marvel draw, which makes the threequel's current haul even more disappointing.
In terms of the overall MCU, Quantumania has surpassed the final box office totals of Black Widow, Shang-Chi and Eternals. However, each of those movies was released in 2021, when cinemas were still getting back to full business, and Black Widow even had a simultaneous digital release.
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Sometimes, future releases can save a movie at the box office, but Quantumania is out in every major market. This past weekend, it added $7.1 million in the US and nearly $10 million internationally, so even Ant-Man's $518.9 million could be a challenge to surpass.
Even with Biden-Inflated Dollars, Ant-Man 3 will not match the box office of the first Ant-Man.
Marvel's latest disaster demanded a corporate response. And they acted to appease angry shareholders.
Victoria Alonso "exited" Marvel on Friday. News of her "departure" broke late yesterday afternoon.
They do not say she was fired. But she was either fired, or she was told her #Woke agenda was no longer affordable after the latest bomb from Marvel, and left in a huff.
Marvel offers no details for why she has "departed" four weeks into the run of a $250+ million bomb. They don't even offer a cover story.
She has no new job lined up.
I think she was canned.
Victoria Alonso is very fond of injecting woke messages into every Marvel project. She mused publicly that the name of the "X-Men" was sexist, and it might be time to rename them something like "The Mutants" or "The X-People."
She announced at a premiere that one of Marvel's oldest character, Namor the Sub-Mariner, was now Hispanic, after being Not-Hispanic for 80 years, and that his name was no longer pronounced Nay-more, but was now Nahmorrh, with a Spanish flair, and that name meant "the boy without love" (sin amor, I think she's trying to say).
Even in the new woke Marvel, Nahmorrh, the boy without love, isn't actually Hispanic. He's Mayan or Aztec or something. The Spanish language would be the language of the conquerors of his people, not his own language.
But Victoria Alonso wanted to win one for the Hispanics so he's Nahhmorrrh.
Although Kevin Fiege cosigned all of the woke agenda choices she's made since being elevated to the number 2 at Marvel, she was certainly the loudest, shrillest voice for "diversity" in the Marvel office.
Look at her most recent Woke Bombs:
Deadline has confirmed that the esteemed Marvel executive and EP of several movies, Victoria Alonso, has exited Marvel Studios after a 17-year run. No reasons were given for her departure, which was effective Friday, and it's not yet clear where she's heading. Her exit is quite a shocker given her amiable demeanor and passion for all things Marvel.
Amiable? Seems like a c*** to me.
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Alonso has also served as an exec producer on Marvel movies and Disney+ series including most recently Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Thor: Love ad Thunder and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, in addition to series such as Loki, Ms. Marvel, and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, to name a few.
She was a leftwing identity politics propagandist first, and it showed in her work:
A consistently outspoken champion of diversity in entertainment, Alonso said during a 2021 Women In Animation panel at the Annecy Animation Film Festival that inclusion, diversity and gender parity "all go hand-in-hand with showing the world as it is."
The veteran executive and producer added that you can look at diversity "from the social point of view, the cultural point of view. But truthfully, this is a business. From a fiscal point of view, you are leaving money on the table by not representing.I think 51% of our audience is female, 28% of our audience is Hispanic. If we don't represent the people that watch what we make, eventually they'll go elsewhere because somebody else will figure it out."
They're always claiming that half or more of women are super fans of comic books.
Literally no one believes this.
I used to see Marvel movies in theaters. I saw the audiences. They were 60-70% male. Women who came would come with their boyfriends and husbands. While there would be a groups of boys and men who went together, with no women, to see the movies, there were no groups of girls or women going together to see Ant-Man.
These figures they cite are lies, and they know they're lies -- but they claim them to be true to justify their forcing of "diversity."
Another instance of Alonso's outspokenness on issues of diversity and inclusion came last year, when the openly gay exec called on then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek to "take a stand" against anti-LGBTQ+ legislation such as Florida's 'Don't Say Gay' bill, revealing in an appearance at the GLAAD Media Awards that she'd already had a "45-minute sit-down" with the exec to ask for "courage" on his part.
Alonso added then that members of the LGBTQ+ community "deserve the right to live, love, and have. More importantly, we deserve an origin story...As long as I am at Marvel Studios I will fight for representation for all of us."
But you're not at Marvel Studios any more, Hag Without Love. What will you do now?
Is Woke Marvel entirely her fault? No, it's also Kevin Fiege's fault. But they had to can someone, and they decided to get rid of the diversity hire who really didn't bring much to the table besides her race, gender, and sexuality.
It's also CEO Bob Iger's fault -- when former CEO Bob Chapek said he would not be getting into a political fight with Ron DeSantis over the "Don't Say Gay" bill, Bob Iger, then a member of Disney's board of directors, publicly called Chapek out and demanded that he fight DeSantis for the right to teachers to sexualize K-3 children.
But Iger's not going to fire himself, obviously. He moved heaven and earth just to get back to running Disney (into the ground).
I still expect Marvel to be pretty much done within three years.
But this is a nice little gift.
Midnight's Edge discusses the firing below, and the "shock" that is reverberating through Hollywood that a woke Tripe-Threat Diversity Hire could actually be fired for poor performance. Putting the other Woke Failures on notice.
The whole thing is worth the watch. If you just want a taste, there's video of Alonso's woke sermons starting at 2:40.
Below, "Diktor Von Doomcock" reports on a claimed report from a screening of The Marvels. He cannot verify this person's identity, and he can't confirm that this is an accurate report.
It sounds plausible, though.
And it sounds like The Marvels will be a true catastrophe.
He talks about the shock of Victoria Alonso's firing possibly heralding "big changes" at Disney. I doubt the changes will be that big, but who knows. He speculates that if the Unfireable Victoria Alonso got fired, then so too might the Unfireable Kathleen Kennedy, responsible for the destruction of the Star Wars franchise.
But then, it seems like Kathleen Kennedy has already been pre-fired. In the below video, Kamran Pasha reveals a leak from a source that at this year's Disney convention, Kennedy will be given a "Viking funeral," celebrating her for all her huge successes. Huge successes she had acting as a coffee-fetcher for Spielberg and Lucas; on her own, she's racked up failure after failure. But Disney will pretend otherwise.
Now, the claim is that this "Viking funeral" was worked out a while ago. Disney would give her a huge ovation, with the understanding that she then announce her intention to leave Disney in a few months.
While she agreed to this last year, the claim goes further, as the day of her Viking Funeral approaches -- I think it will be in May of this year -- she has attempted to weasel out of the deal and argue that she should be kept in charge of LucasFilm, to do further damage.
But the report is that Disney -- Chapek, then Iger -- have said a firm "no" to Kennedy's attempts to cling to power and they want her out after the Disney convention.