Post by darkpast on Sept 25, 2018 16:33:33 GMT
Box Office: 'Captain Marvel' Is Being Set Up To Fail
In news that broke yesterday while I was catching up with Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself (the first half-hour with Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde is iffy, through no fault of theirs, but the rest of the film is solid and Antonio Banderas is superb), Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. just dated their untitled Birds of Prey movie for Feb. 7, 2020. That pits it against Sony’s Peter Rabbit 2 (#justice4Paddington) and one week before the untitled James Bond 25. Amusingly enough, James Bond 25 was initially slotted to open one week after Wonder Woman 1984 and will now open one week after Birds of Prey.
We have no idea what Cathy Yan’s “girl gang” superhero/supervillain flick is going to be like, including whether or not Margot Robbie’s talk of an R-rating is a bluff. But with Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman 1984, Birds of Prey and that long-desired Black Widow movie coming down the pike, the future of the comic book superhero movie may be, as they say, female. Not exclusively, mind you, but with enough regularity that we won’t’ have to treat these as do-or-die events every time out. What that means, among other things, is that Captain Marvel doesn’t have to top $1 billion to be a hit.
I don’t want to pick on a single article, but CNBC ran a post yesterday calling Captain Marvel, played by Brie Larson, Marvel’s next billion-dollar star. Allow me to nip this in the bud right now. Captain Marvel could be another $1 billion+ worldwide grosser. However, that’s not remotely a guarantee at this premature juncture. It may not even match the domestic ($413 million) and worldwide ($821m) totals of Wonder Woman. Unless Marvel and Walt Disney went uncharacteristically over budget, it won’t have to. Should Captain Marvel find itself on the defensive when it “only” earns about what Ant-Man and the Wasp ($621m) pulled in?
Wonder Woman benefited from rave reviews and a narrative of Gal Gadot’s female superhero “saving” the DCEU after the critically-slammed Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad. It offered a solo female director (Patty Jenkins) showing that women could make mega-budget action blockbusters that were at least as good as the male-directed competition. It had the good fortune to open after the relatively underwhelming King Arthur, Alien: Covenant and Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and before the relatively underwhelming The Mummy, Cars 3 and Transformers: The Last Knight. It slew all relevant competition right up until Illumination’s Despicable Me 3 and Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Captain Marvel will have to contend with potentially heavier competition. No, I don’t think The LEGO Movie 2 or X-Men: Dark Phoenix will pull a Black Panther and steamroll the competition well into April. The Brie Larson superhero flick opens right between DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 3 and Jordan Peele’s Us while having just three weeks before Walt Disney’s own Tim Burton-directed Dumbo movie. It has a month before DC Films’ Shazam, but a month should be enough time to foretell the film’s fate. Point being, if the February and March flicks are good/popular then Captain Marvel becomes less of an event.
Beauty and the Beast stood out in an otherwise action movie-filled March to earn $504 million domestic and $1.2 billion worldwide. Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast was a fairy tale musical amid a bunch of action movies, while (oddly enough) Captain Marvel is the only “big” action flick between Dark Phoenix and Shazam. Maybe the studio learned what happens when one action movie (Black Panther) rules them all. So, yes, Captain Marvel COULD pull in $1b global. However, just because Wonder Woman earned $821m and Black Panther earned $1.345b doesn’t mean that Captain Marvel is going to outgross Spider-Man: Homecoming ($881m) and Thor: Ragnarok ($854m).
Here’s another key thing to remember: Wonder Woman didn’t succeed on the scale that it did specifically because audiences raced out to support female-led action movies. It succeeded because people really wanted to see a Wonder Woman movie. If audiences supported female-led action movies on principle, then the likes of Tomb Raider, Atomic Blonde, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and Ghost in the Shell would have much bigger grossers, especially in North America. The same thing with Black Panther relatively speaking. The success of that MCU epic didn’t magically turn John Boyega’s Pacific Rim: Uprising or even the fantastical A Wrinkle in Time into a hit.
That’s not necessarily a criticism. Okay, yes it is because you know where I stand on that (“Wakanda Forever, but please go see Gringo too!”). Moreover, Captain Marvel doesn’t have the same “solo not a white guy director with a media-friendly story” hook that Wonder Woman and Black Panther had. Captain Marvel isn’t anywhere near as popular as Wonder Woman or Harley Quinn. Especially after that cryptic first trailer, Captain Marvel may be the first MCU movie where, unless the fact that it’s a female superhero movie matters (which it should) the primary hook is that it’s another MCU movie. The undenial power of the trailer's "can stand up, will stand up" closing montage notwithstanding, that's a different pitch.
To the extent that general audiences aren’t inherently familiar with the Captain Marvel character, there is a huge difference between “It's a Wonder Woman movie!” and “It's an MCU movie where the superhero happens to be a woman this time!” Even if Black Panther was a cult character (at least among white folks), he was an easy sell as “What if James Bond was king of a scientifically enhanced African nation?” The movie was also able to sell itself as “from the director of Fruitvale Station and Creed” which is an easier pitch than “from the directors of Half Nelson, Sugar and Mississippi Grind.”
None of this means that Captain Marvel is doomed. Here’s another MCU movie with a lousy first trailer. Marvel is a trusted brand. The mere pitch of “Hey, it’s a Marvel movie with a lady in the lead role this time!” should be enough to score pretty huge on International Women’s Day. Presuming the movie is decent (fun fact: Sugar is an underseen masterpiece), or at least offers a crowd-pleasing Captain Marvel, the only thing that would go “wrong” is if folks start crowing about superhero fatigue or “Uh oh, Wonder Woman was a fluke!” if Captain Marvel “only” earns $550 million to $650m worldwide.
The future of the comic book movie may be female, because that is the next stage of evolution for the superhero movie (film noir/pulp adventure à modern day heroes in present-tense adventures à interconnected mythologies à superhero stories about women and minorities), but that’s something I’d like to dive into later when I have a moment. Wonder Woman was a massive hit because it was a well-reviewed and well-received Wonder Woman movie that tapped into the cultural zeitgeist. Ditto Black Panther. As much as I would love to argue that its success meant that big-budget female-led action movies were now bulletproof, we sadly know better.
Captain Marvel, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, is probably going to be a huge hit next March. But it need not match Wonder Woman and it has no business being saddled with the expectations of being a $1 billion+ global grosser. Nobody expected Black Panther to do Black Panther business back in February just as few of us expected Wonder Woman to do Wonder Woman business in the summer of 2017. Captain Marvel, like Wonder Woman 1984, Birds of Prey and Black Widow, can be a winner without breaking records. When you have enough of these, they stop having to prove a damn thing.
Here’s another key thing to remember: Wonder Woman didn’t succeed on the scale that it did specifically because audiences raced out to support female-led action movies. It succeeded because people really wanted to see a Wonder Woman movie. If audiences supported female-led action movies on principle, then the likes of Tomb Raider, Atomic Blonde, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and Ghost in the Shell would have much bigger grossers, especially in North America. The same thing with Black Panther relatively speaking. The success of that MCU epic didn’t magically turn John Boyega’s Pacific Rim: Uprising or even the fantastical A Wrinkle in Time into a hit.
That’s not necessarily a criticism. Okay, yes it is because you know where I stand on that (“Wakanda Forever, but please go see Gringo too!”). Moreover, Captain Marvel doesn’t have the same “solo not a white guy director with a media-friendly story” hook that Wonder Woman and Black Panther had. Captain Marvel isn’t anywhere near as popular as Wonder Woman or Harley Quinn. Especially after that cryptic first trailer, Captain Marvel may be the first MCU movie where, unless the fact that it’s a female superhero movie matters (which it should) the primary hook is that it’s another MCU movie. The undenial power of the trailer's "can stand up, will stand up" closing montage notwithstanding, that's a different pitch.
To the extent that general audiences aren’t inherently familiar with the Captain Marvel character, there is a huge difference between “It's a Wonder Woman movie!” and “It's an MCU movie where the superhero happens to be a woman this time!” Even if Black Panther was a cult character (at least among white folks), he was an easy sell as “What if James Bond was king of a scientifically enhanced African nation?” The movie was also able to sell itself as “from the director of Fruitvale Station and Creed” which is an easier pitch than “from the directors of Half Nelson, Sugar and Mississippi Grind.”
None of this means that Captain Marvel is doomed. Here’s another MCU movie with a lousy first trailer. Marvel is a trusted brand. The mere pitch of “Hey, it’s a Marvel movie with a lady in the lead role this time!” should be enough to score pretty huge on International Women’s Day. Presuming the movie is decent (fun fact: Sugar is an underseen masterpiece), or at least offers a crowd-pleasing Captain Marvel, the only thing that would go “wrong” is if folks start crowing about superhero fatigue or “Uh oh, Wonder Woman was a fluke!” if Captain Marvel “only” earns $550 million to $650m worldwide.
The future of the comic book movie may be female, because that is the next stage of evolution for the superhero movie (film noir/pulp adventure à modern day heroes in present-tense adventures à interconnected mythologies à superhero stories about women and minorities), but that’s something I’d like to dive into later when I have a moment. Wonder Woman was a massive hit because it was a well-reviewed and well-received Wonder Woman movie that tapped into the cultural zeitgeist. Ditto Black Panther. As much as I would love to argue that its success meant that big-budget female-led action movies were now bulletproof, we sadly know better.
Captain Marvel, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, is probably going to be a huge hit next March. But it need not match Wonder Woman and it has no business being saddled with the expectations of being a $1 billion+ global grosser. Nobody expected Black Panther to do Black Panther business back in February just as few of us expected Wonder Woman to do Wonder Woman business in the summer of 2017. Captain Marvel, like Wonder Woman 1984, Birds of Prey and Black Widow, can be a winner without breaking records. When you have enough of these, they stop having to prove a damn thing.
