The Marvels | November 10, 2023 | Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter

[ZattMurdock]

24 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

Four weeks isn't unusual by Marvel reshoot standards tbf

For context, this is the part of the article that talks about The Marvels:

 

Quote

“The Marvels,” which opens in theaters on Nov. 10, will struggle to get the ball past the infield, at least by Marvel’s outsized standards. The movie, which cost $250 million and sees Brie Larson reprising her role as Captain Marvel, is tracking to open to $75 million-$80 million — far below the $185 million “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” took in domestically in its debut weekend last year.
  

Directed by Nia DaCosta, “The Marvels” unites Larson’s heroine with two superpowered allies, Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau (introduced in the 2021 Disney+ series “WandaVision”) and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan (first seen in the 2022 series “Ms. Marvel”). But instead of seamlessly building on the success of “Captain Marvel,” this move resulted in four weeks of reshoots to bring coherence to a tangled storyline.

  

Then eyebrows were raised again when DaCosta began working on another film while “The Marvels” was still in postproduction — the filmmaker moved to London earlier this year to begin prepping for her Tessa Thompson drama “Hedda.”  (A representative for DaCosta declined to comment.) 

 

“If you’re directing a $250 million movie, it’s kind of weird for the director to leave with a few months to go,” says a source familiar with the production. 

 

“The Marvels” has seen its release date moved back twice, too, once to swap places with “Quantumania,” which was deemed further along, and again when its debut shifted from July to November to give the filmmakers more time to tinker. But that extra time didn’t necessarily help. In June, Marvel, which traditionally only solicits feedback from Disney employees and their friends and families, took the uncharacteristic step of holding a public test screening in Texas. The audience gave the film middling reviews.

 

But Marvel has never been in the business of being average. “Kevin’s real superpower, his genius, has always been in postproduction and getting his hands on movies and making sure that they finished strongly,” the source adds. “These days, he’s spread thin.” (Feige declined to comment for this story.) 

 

  

Also I’d argue that if anything, this article seems weird. If this is on Disney or anyone else, I don’t know. It’s not unusual to a director to work in prep for a different film during post-production. I could list several MCU films that were made like that, it all depends which kind of pre-production the director is doing in another project.

Edited November 1, 2023 by ZattMurdock

[SpiderByte]

We need a separate general Marvel thread because for fucks sake we cannot have just any discussion about Marvel be this movies thread.

[Torontofan]

24 minutes ago, nevermore said:

$250M budget according to them.

 

yet the MCU movies look more and more bland. 

[ZeroHour]

5 minutes ago, TwoMisfits said:

 

Yeah, it seems like in June, corporate decided the movie wasn't worth waiting out the strike for...that it would be too much money and time to fix (and it would disrupt too much of the future timeline), so they instead set a team of editors onto the film to try to get a better cut from what they had and delayed to the point they could make a better version...this seems like a very Morbius strategy...hopefully, the movie can be better than that...

Plus, if they came to those conclusions, they probably just wanted to get this over with and done. Interestingly, June is also when they moved up Deadpool 3 into the May 2024 slot. Sounds like they wanted the closest thing they have to a guaranteed hit to be the next thing up.

[Eric is Anxious]

8 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

We need a separate general Marvel thread because for fucks sake we cannot have just any discussion about Marvel be this movies thread.

That's why we have the Disney thread. So far, everything being talked about is in context with The Marvels, so we're fine.

[SpiderByte]

Just now, Eric Presley said:

That's why we have the Disney thread. So far, everything being talked about is in context with The Marvels, so we're fine.

The page long discussion about Black Panther included?

[keysersoze123]

22 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

The 250 budget seems just more like ballparking from that one person. But I feel like if they were just leaving it to die like WB did Blue Beetle they wouldn't be pushing the marketing so hard

I would not say anything is accurate but this is Variety. They would not come up with a number out of nothing. They would have some studio insider provide the number. But we will get "official" budget next week for sure. Either way its irrelevant. 

[Eric is Anxious]

2 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

The page long discussion about Black Panther included?

Oh, I thought you were talking about the Variety article. My apologies. Yes, that stuff about Black Panther 2 should not have been there. When that happens, please report those posts. I was asleep when that conversation started. And while other staff members are around, we can't be here at a moment's notice. Reporting makes it a lot easier to fix a situation.

[Liiviig 1998]

Nvm

Edited November 1, 2023 by Liiviig 1998

[Zakiyyah6]

7 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

The page long discussion about Black Panther included?

Sorry for talking about Black Panther briefly. I'll go back to talking about The Marvels terrible worldwide tracking and then you'll complain about how that is off topic too. That or we'll be accused of engaging in hyperbole even when we're not.

[SpiderByte]

1 minute ago, Zakiyyah6 said:

Sorry for talking about Black Panther briefly. I'll go back to talking about The Marvels terrible worldwide tracking and then you'll complain about how that is off topic too. That or we'll be accused of engaging in hyperbole even when we're not.

Talking about the tracking isn't off topic. Using that tracking to then say Marvel must cancel all their upcoming projects and that they need to hard reboot is.

[Liiviig 1998]

Reading through the blade stuff and alleged script treatments  was hilarious . 

[YM!]

10 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

Talking about the tracking isn't off topic. Using that tracking to then say Marvel must cancel all their upcoming projects and that they need to hard reboot is.

I mean I agree that there’s been some ridiculous hyperbole like Marvel as a whole being dead or no Avengers could do 1B without Spidey but I do think it’s fair to discuss the franchise moving forward mainly because we’d done the same with other franchises (here’s looking at you DC and Sony/Marvel), and I do think it’s fair to call notice that things aren’t going well right now.
 

I don’t think Marvels flopping will effect the MCU as a whole or that everything else will die but seeing what worked and what didn’t is fair to draw, so long as we go into like hyperbole or obvious trolling like some of the pages last night.

Edited November 1, 2023 by YM!

[SpiderByte]

Though I do wonder how many reviews will be about this article and not the movie, though only a few of the Loki reviews were about "the show is bad because Majors isn't recast"

[TheFlatLannister]

4 hours ago, John Marston said:

Black Panther 2 did fine but it still attracted a lot of curiosity due to how the movie would handle Boseman’s passing. It also had pretty average legs considering it had about 5 weeks of no competition. Black Panther 3 will definitely take another sizable drop 

Short legs shouldn’t be held against WF. It opened to $180M and made $450M so multi doesn’t matter that much 

[Zakiyyah6]

15 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

Though I do wonder how many reviews will be about this article and not the movie, though only a few of the Loki reviews were about "the show is bad because Majors isn't recast"

I bet that didn't bother you when the critics did that with other franchises. What's good for the goose...

[SpiderByte]

4 minutes ago, Zakiyyah6 said:

I bet that didn't bother you when the critics did that with other franchises. What's good for the goose...

No? It's dumb when reviews are reviews of the production or behind the scenes and not the actual movie.

[Zakiyyah6]

4 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

No? It's dumb when reviews are reviews of the production or behind the scenes and not the actual movie.

Well I stand corrected then. I agree that professional reviews should review the film in front of them. Not behind the scenes stuff or anything like that. 

[ZattMurdock]

31 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

Though I do wonder how many reviews will be about this article and not the movie, though only a few of the Loki reviews were about "the show is bad because Majors isn't recast"

I wouldn’t sincerely worry about that. This kind of worry doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, there was no more troubled blockbuster production than Rogue One and that ended up becoming one of the best Star Wars films of all time. If the film is good, the reviews will call it, if it isn’t, it isn’t. The single time I’ve disagreed with reviewers when it comes to the MCU was with Love and Thunder, the rest I can definitely see their points.

[ThomasNicole]

Some of the complains about this thread sounds like crybaby to me. There is some hyperbolic posts i agreed, and yes it’s annoying, but there’s not that many and they’re usually directly linked with The Marvels at some degree because as everyone knows, it’s a cinematic interlinked universe. Compared to pretty much everywhere, we have very tame discussions. 
 

I feel most of the tensions here starts because some users simply answers nearly everyone with a defensive tone trying to protect the brand from criticism, any type of criticism. 
 

And it just seems natural to me, The Marvels is tracking poorly, a huge article from a big trade just dropped talking about problems in this production and how it’s prospects can impact MCU going forward. Why everyone have to pretend nothing is happening? This wasn’t a problem back in the day when everything was doing great and people talk about how the huge success and acclaim could impact the future. I know there are excesses and it can and should be prevented, but other than that, this is not a toxic place, most people just won’t pretend everything is fine.
 

Anyway, this is what i think about the last night situation that ended up with the thread locked. 
 

About The Marvels itself, i agreed 4 weeks of reshoots aren’t really that unusual. I think the main problem Variety told is that they opened their very secretive test screenings to a broader audience and it didn’t worked, even after reshoots. 
 

I think this movie just faced some inevitable things during production. For a few months there’s rumors that they actually wanted to change some things, reshoot some more, rewrite a bit, and nothing was made because of the strikes, leading to hard cuts on post production which lead to the 93 minute running time (without credits).
 

Let’s see if the movie ended up working now that is finished and they simply cut a lot of things that they couldn’t fix, i though the clip they dropped was very good. But if it ended up being a mess, this can go down as maybe the first victim of the strikes in it’s quality, like it happened in 2008-2009. 
 

Having issues to find the right movie in post production and needing more work to get there is not the ideal situation, but it’s normal. The strikes maybe simply didn’t let it happen with this movie. 
 

I expect similar stories about other productions next year, studios really fucked themselves allowing this strike to go on for so long. 

Edited November 1, 2023 by ThomasNicole