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

[John Marston]

250m budget means Flash and Indy 5 have some competition for biggest bomb of the year 

[Firepower]

I was told this movie might get The Dark Knight level reception that will save it months ago. I understand that copium is strong here, but cmon.

[SpiderByte]

12 minutes ago, ZattMurdock said:

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.

There are definitely some reviews where they just litigate about a films behind the scenes issues. And I don't mean like Polanski movies where the creator is just an abject monster, that's different.

[Bob Train]

Reading between the lines on that Variety article, The movie is trash, Disney knows it is trash, so they are dumping it and waving the white flag to cut losses.

 

It was obvious from the moment they decided to lift social media reactions, filled with very lenient fanboys, a mere 2 days before the movie releases. Other warning signs were not delaying it to 2024 (which would allow cast to fully promote it presumably), the short runtime, not holding fan screening a la Guardians 3, and low interactions on social media sites.

 

In the article, some other red flags mentioned are the director leaving before post is finished and poor test screenings. Yet some are certain the movie will be a well-received movie? I mean, anything is possible, but the actions Disney is not taken are not the actions a studio confident in their product would take. If they were, they would hold fan screening and move the social embargo up at the very least. 

[Skim Beeble]

I don't know if anyone mentioned this, but imagine how much worse things would be looking for it right now if Dune kept its release date and Imax screens. 

Edited November 1, 2023 by Skim Beeble

[eddyxx]

6 hours ago, SpiderByte said:

Four weeks isn't unusual by Marvel reshoot standards tbf

The director leaving the film before post production is finished is eyebrow raising though.

[eddyxx]

6 hours 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.

I wanted to post this, this morning, but the thread was locked; the marvel movies do not exist in a vacuum. This movie is struggling in pre-sales for exactly this reason. People are over Marvel putting out generic trash so this movie, whether it’s actually good or not, is paying the price for the sins of at least 4 other movies and who knows how many tv shows released in the last 24 months.  Also we have always discussed the state of and future of marvel in the threads of whatever the upcoming MCU movie is. And when this film releases, we will move on from this film and forget it even exists and start talking about the state of the MCU in the thread of whatever is releasing in May instead. 

[SpiderByte]

2 minutes ago, eddyxx said:

I wanted to post this, this morning, but the thread was locked; the marvel movies do not exist in a vacuum. This movie is struggling in pre-sales for exactly this reason. People are over Marvel putting out generic trash so this movie, whether it’s actually good or not, is paying the price for the sins of at least 4 other movies and who knows how many tv shows released in the last 24 months.  Also we have always discussed the state of and future of marvel in the threads of whatever the upcoming MCU movie is. And when this film releases, we will move on from this film and forget it even exists and start talking about the state of the MCU in the thread of whatever is releasing in May instead. 

No. We cannot have every individual MCU thread devolve into two hundred pages of a referendum on the entire franchise.

[eddyxx]

6 hours ago, Liiviig 1998 said:

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

The blade stuff, the thinking that  quantamania was a banger from  that one marvel tell all book, the fact that SOME ONE approved the script for Love and Thunder…I just have no words.

[ZattMurdock]

11 minutes ago, eddyxx said:

The director leaving the film before post production is finished is eyebrow raising though.

Directors working on different films during post-production is quite more common than people realize. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t working on the film during post-production, and judging the person who wrote this piece, it does weird me out how this isn’t really the first time she has done similar articles. Last time was Ray Fisher, and there is kind of a pattern forming here.

 

Also if that wasn’t damning enough, there is this:

 

Quote

Instead, sources at THR believe Siegel was motivated by a tense relationship with Reporter stablemate Kim Masters, a legendary journalistic giant killer with more pelts on her wall than Don Jr. The relationship grew especially frosty, sources say, due to differing takes on actor Ray Fisher’s battle with Joss Whedon and Warner Bros. (Neither reporter would discuss the matter on the record.)

https://lamag.com/news/hollywood-trade-wars-heat-up

 

Siegel wrote a scathing article on Ray Fisher back in the day for Rolling Stone, and apparently there was a very public schism between THR’s Kim Masters and her over Ray Fisher. I don’t think Snyder is a saint, but I do think that there was something incredibly fucked up about Fisher’s whole situation there. There is also this thread by Fisher that sparked the article above from last year:

 

 

[ZattMurdock]

Not really about The Marvels, but since Tatiana Spiegel wrote the article and part of it is about this film, I think this adds context to the LA Mag article that I’ve posted above. Siegel used to work for THR at the time of this article, left THR and went work to Rolling Stone, where she published the article that Fisher mentions on his tweets. Apparently, the disagreement between Masters and Spiegel was due to this piece:

 

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/feature/ray-fisher-opens-up-about-justice-league-joss-whedon-and-warners-i-dont-believe-some-of-these-people-are-fit-for-leadership-4161658/

 

Which is in direct opposition to the article Spiegel posted later at Rolling Stone.

[eddyxx]

Directors starting work on their next film during post production of their current film is common yes, Speilberg is a master of it but that article says she stopped working on the film full stop. That’s what is eyebrow raising. Paired with I think it was a article a while back that she said it wasn’t really her film..like what?  She’s washing her hands of the movie and for some reason isn’t doing any interviews about the movie she has coming out next weekend.

[ThomasNicole]

We can’t talk about the MCU as a whole but we can talk about Justice League drama … okay 

 

 

Edited November 1, 2023 by ThomasNicole

[eddyxx]

1 minute ago, ThomasNicole said:

We can’t talk about the MCU as a whole but we can talk about Justice League drama … okay 

 

 

Or talk about the writer of a news article which seems like a personal attack against that writer?

[ThomasNicole]

19 minutes ago, eddyxx said:

Directors starting work on their next film during post production of their current film is common yes, Speilberg is a master of it but that article says she stopped working on the film full stop. That’s what is eyebrow raising. Paired with I think it was a article a while back that she said it wasn’t really her film..like what?  She’s washing her hands of the movie and for some reason isn’t doing any interviews about the movie she has coming out next weekend.

The article didn’t make it clear if she wasn’t part of the post production to be fair.
 

The eyebrow raising fact to me is that she moved to another country to start prepping for another movie. Which means: or she traveled A LOT to be present in the post production while start the other movie, or she supervised the whole thing from a distance, which is weird for this type of production. 

 

And yes she was very polite as always, but she indeed said it was Feige’s movie and her goal was to make something with his vision that she also can be proud of. 
 

I think is a very fair and mature response tbh because MCU does works this way, is just very unusual to see the director being so open about it even before the movie drops.

[ThomasNicole]

2 minutes ago, eddyxx said:

Or talk about the writer of a news article which seems like a personal attack against that writer?

Yeah it does have a “oh there’s something itchy about the writer, don’t believe in this report” vibe 

[HummingLemon496]

It's completely over honestly. I don't think there has been a more obvious bomb than this. 

Edited November 1, 2023 by HummingLemon496

[eddyxx]

6 minutes ago, HummingLemon496 said:

It's completely over honestly. I don't think there has been a more obvious bomb than this. 

blue beetle, the flash, Shazam 2 just this year alone lol.

[ZattMurdock]

1 minute ago, eddyxx said:

Directors starting work on their next film during post production of their current film is common yes, Speilberg is a master of it but that article says she stopped working on the film full stop. That’s what is eyebrow raising. Paired with I think it was an article a while back that she said it wasn’t really her film..like what?  She’s washing her hands of the movie and for some reason isn’t doing any interviews about the movie she has coming out next weekend.

Regardless how I take several issues with the article - and Coy kinda summarizes it here my biggest peeve:

 

 

What you are saying - and I don’t blame you because that’s what a lot of people on Twitter are saying - is different than what Spiegel has written, and most of what Nia DaCosta said. So here is Spiegel’s article’s bit on 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.) 

 

And here is what Nia DaCosta said for her Vanity Fair profile, on which both DaCosta and Feige talked candidly praising each other, from where the quote that got modified into oblivion came from:

 

Quote

Postproduction proved to be most challenging. The Marvels shares a bloodline with Captain Marveland the Ms. Marvel TV show as well as future films. Feige says he prioritizes individual movies over the grander sweep of the studio’s storytelling: “The overarching narrative is secondary to the narrative of the individual film.” But DaCosta was fully cognizant that she’d been hired by a powerful entity to do a job. “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie,” she says. “So I think you live in that reality, but I tried to go in with the knowledge that some of you is going to take a back seat.”

 

 
But that’s far from the only thing they said about each other and the film for Nia’s Vanity Fair profile. Actually, the information supposedly ‘provided’ by Variety today in what it sort of looks as a hit piece that questions Nia DaCosta’s professionalism isn’t even new information. You can read about this on the Vanity Fair article that both DaCosta and Feige were interviewed for:

 

Quote

As she awaits the release of The Marvels in November, DaCosta has decamped from social media. Captain Marvel, which was directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, may have been an enormous hit, but it was also one of the few female-fronted films in the studio’s universe—and, not coincidentally, the recipient of sexist vitriol from the darkest corners of the fandom. As for The Marvels, it centers on three women, including the first Muslim superhero in one of the studio’s movies. “I’m just girding myself for it,” DaCosta says. “I am a sensitive soul, and I think maybe more of us are than we want to admit.”

 

DaCosta is also still grappling with the breakthroughs she’s made, including the fact that The Marvelsis the highest-budgeted film ever helmed by a Black woman. (DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Timepreviously held that title with $100 million.) On sets, she’s noticed that the way she’s spoken to, or heard, is different than it would be for someone who doesn’t look like her. “Sometimes as a Black woman, you realize that [people think] you take up more space than you actually do, or your voice sounds louder to people than it actually is, or your tone is more stern than it actually is,” she says.

 

Despite having Peele’s full support on Candyman, DaCosta says that some “ridiculous” things happened on that set, with crew members saying “things that are super inappropriate, that you would just never say to anyone else because they were so specific to my gender, my race, my age.” She had a very different experience on The Marvels, fortunately, in part because she had the power to hire the people she wanted for her team. “I realized it wasn’t ever gonna be about how much power I amassed or how many great movies I made, or if I won awards, it was always just going to be the people that I surrounded myself with,” she says. “The thing that I’ve been most surprised by lately is how much respect I’m getting from these middle-aged white dudes that I work with.”

 

Having navigated the studio system for years now, Da­Costa has turned back to smaller universes. When we first spoke, she was just a week from starting production on Hedda,running from actor rehearsals in the morning to production meetings in the afternoon. The film is based on DaCosta’s own adaptation of Ibsen’s classic play Hedda Gabler, about a bored woman trapped in an unhappy marriage. She calls the script an “esoteric psychological thriller” and has cast Thompson in the lead role. A few days after our interview, however, the actors union joined the Writers Guild on strike, bringing most scripted productions like Hedda to an immediate halt.

 

There is also this quote:

 

Quote

DaCosta is also attached to direct an adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s novel The Water Dancer, a surrealist story about an enslaved man who discovers a mysterious power after almost drowning in a river. But she insists that her plan after Hedda is to take a break, having worked constantly for eight years. DaCosta is single—“Know anybody?” she asks me with a laugh—and wouldn’t mind staying in London, which she’s begun to view as home after living there for back-to-back projects. But taking time off may be a challenge for someone who’s never at a loss for inspiration. “She works nonstop and is a fountain of ideas,” says Feige. “She would spend time in between setups pitching me other movies and other ideas and other stories, because that’s the way her mind works.”

 

Collaborating on a huge IP-driven movie like The Marvels has made DaCosta long to write original films again. She’s got sci-fi and fantasy stories she’s ready to tell, and now she has all the skills she needs. “It was really great to play in this world, and to be a part of building this big world,” she says, “but it made me just want to build my own world more.”

 

Here is the article, it’s actually a pretty chill and candid interview with Nia and Kevin sharing stories about working with her on The Marvels and vice versa: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/09/nia-dacosta-on-navigating-the-blockbuster-machine?utm_brand=vf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned

 

My point and what I’m saying is: how an interview that was clearly candid ended up becoming a hit piece against Nia DaCosta? It’s obvious that DaCosta and Feige are in good terms, and with the strike following, this interview, DaCosta would have little to do other than work on post for The Marvels.
 

Like Fisher, both DaCosta and Feige "declined to comment" (or didn’t they? It wouldn’t be the first time that Spiegel would say that and someone would come out with the receipts proving otherwise like Fisher did, but I sincerely doubt either DaCosta or Feige would go through all the trouble).

 

I don’t know if the film is good or bad. DaCosta claiming she is conscious that she is a hired gun isn’t different than similar points made by Gunn and several other directors before, she talks about her brainstorming process with Feige on the article there, knowing that these characters live inside an universe that she has proved time and time again before to be incredibly knowledgeable of. Maybe she isn’t Iman but this woman know her Marvel comics culture. I’m just saying, I won’t take this film from DaCosta. If it’s good, that’s on her, not the MCU. 

[HummingLemon496]

2 minutes ago, eddyxx said:

blue beetle, the flash, Shazam 2 just this year alone lol.

Blue Beetle was an obvious bomb before tracking, but for some weird reason (when tracking started) r/boxoffice pretended it was gonna be some breakout hit just because it was tracking slightly higher than Shazam 2. Hell once reviews came out a lot of people seriously thought it was gonna outgross The Flash

 

The Flash was more of a gradual decline than instant death like The Marvels. It really it took until the CinemaScore to come out to seal the deal. Even when reviews were mid (65-70%) and presales were weak some people still insisted it would be some ultra leggy word of mouth Goliath. 

 

Shazam 2. . ok I'll give you that one. That movie was doomed.