Adding TV shows into the mix that were average made it too much to bother keeping up, and I haven't watched MCU since then.

Were they trying to keep the movie release a secret for a reason?

Seems like a lot of us had no idea it was coming out this weekend…

I saw it today. It was fine. It's far from "the worst movie in the MCU" like some reviews I've seen. And I didn't watch Ms. Marvel or Secret War, either. Still followed the story fine (I am a casual comics fan so I'm already vaguely familiar w/ Ms. Marvel and the Kree/Skrull war, in fairness).

Biggest contributor to the low B.O. in my opinion was the studios dragging out the writers & actors strikes and not being able to mount any publicity for the movie. I only remembered it was opening this weekend when I saw all the negative headlines about it coming out.

Maybe is a good time to go back and get good stories scripts and hire good directors.

Great my fucking YouTube feed is gonna be drowning in so many "go woke go broke" posts from now til the end of goddamn time thanks Disney you fucks.

At this point they're doing this shit on purpose to get more people voting red so they won't ever pay taxes again ever.

I honestly believe Captain Marvel was the start of the downfall of Marvel. Not because of the cast, sex, or anything along those lines.

I believe they over did the character. They made her way to damn strong which made all the other characters pointless.

Remember when a literal god, the most advanced mech, and the super soldier with all the stats struggled with Thanos? Then Cpt Marvel swoops in destroys a couple of ships and takes one on the chin like nothing, that was the moment. The first movie benefitted from a month release from Endgame. Everyone thought it would have something major in it.

The movie wasn't horrible, it followed most of the other mediocre movies. Origin story where we meet a villain that we will never see again and some powers we will never see again. The acting and the cast were good but it was just ok.

Can't wait for the neckbeards to blame the show being about de wimmens as the cause rather than increasingly nonsensical oversaturation

@neme I remember the advertising for The Marvels was pretty bad. You had commercials that felt like advertisements for the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general. One ad I got was like “Remember when Tony Stark built his first suit and became Iron Man? The Marvels, in theaters this November”

Haven't seen the new movie. Even though it was panned I liked the first.

The biggest issue is just Marvel OVERLOAD in general, people are finally starting to get tired of it.

We've had so much Marvel for so long. People are just losing interest in general.

Are these newer movies really that much worse in general or has the audience just finally gotten tired of the entire MCU? I saw every single one up until the second Spider-Man flick and many of them were just sort of lame. Movies like Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel and Black Panther and the Ant-Man movies which all released in the MCU's most dominant period leading up to and in between the Thanos movies were pretty bad and they still made a lot of bank.

I watched all those mid movies because I was invested in the shared continuity and wanted to see the different branches of the universe collide with each other. When they finally did, that investment just kind of dissipated, but I think the final nail in the coffin for me was when they announced the Disney+ Marvel shows at which point it just became too much of a time commitment to keep up with.

I wouldn't personally say that it has anything to do with fatigue or oversaturation. I think the reality of it is that the majority of these movies have no heart, feeling, or direction. The obvious counter example to this trend is the Guardians of the Galaxy films, all of which are dripping with heart and are obviously thoughtfully crafted, and are all around good moving despite being in the MCU. If this universe of films were all given the same amount of care and thought as those films, I think they would all be successful. But alas, capitalism.

I'll take that $47M if they don't want it

Good. Less marvel movies, the better.

I actually had no idea this was out already. I've been watching Loki. It really seems like they should have spaced these further apart.

I don’t even want to go see a good Marvel movie in the theater. I’m certainly not going to go watch some mid bs.

Who could have ever guessed audiences would start getting disinterested in these movies? 😱

Isn't $47 million dollars for one weekend pretty good? What did they spend to make the movie?

Or, realize that after 33 films, we have superhero-fatigue.

People already didn't care for Captain Marvel, so it'd have to be a really good movie to convince people to watch it. The fact that it's even worse and more generic than that is the nail in the coffin. I'm surprised it managed to get almost $50 million at all.

I'll be honest, I actually loved Ms. Marvel and will definitely watch The Marvels as soon as it hits streaming, but pretty much the only movie I can think of on the horizon that could get me to physically go to a filthy, disgusting movie theater filled with horrible annoying movie-goers is Dune part 2. The experience of going to see films in theaters lost all of its appeal to me in recent years, and there's always one motherfucker on their phone the whole time that no one will do anything about.

I think they’ve just gone back to the well too many times and it’s starting to run dry. Prior to Marvel reinventing the genre, I was never a big fan of superhero movies. Other than the occasional ones like Watchmen or Unbreakable, I found them formulaic and vapid. The MCU combined a sense of humor with outstanding sfx and excellent casting. I think I’ve seen all of them, many multiple times, and I own most of them.

For me, the Avengers conclusion was disappointing. It wasn’t as bad as GoT S8, but it really felt like everyone just wanted to be done with it. It’s kind of ruined the franchise for me, but honestly I was probably getting close to done anyway. I did think the new Guardians was okay, but the rest of them have once again become vapid and formulaic.

It has nothing to do with wokeness. I think Our Flag Means Death is one of the greatest tv shows of all time, and I’d rather watch Barbie again than those last few Marvels - I actually enjoyed that one.

Look, I just don't feel like sitting in an enclosed space for a couple hours breathing the same air as a bunch of randos these days.

Also, fuck Disney.

So a couple of points...

Marvel has really felt like it's lost it's vision since Endgame. Everything from Iron Man forward had been building to that point and once they hit it, it's like they forgot what they were doing.

The current big bad didn't get introduced until Loki, a Disney+ show, and if you look at the properties:

Endgame - 4/26/2019
Spider-Man: Far From Home - 7/2/2019
Wandavision - 1/15/21
Falcon and Winter Soldier - 3/19/21
Loki - 6/9/21

That's a full 2 year gap and three properties before anyone gets a sense of where the next phase is going. Then:

Black Widow - 7/9/21 (unrelated flashback)
What If? - 8/11/21 (unrelated)
Shang Chi - 9/3/21 (unrelated)
Eternals - 11/5/21 (unrelated)
Hawkeye - 11/24/21 (unrelated)
Spider-Man: No Way Home - 12/17/21

Using Spider-Man to crack open the multiverse first announced in Loki 6 months previously was a good idea, but there was no mention of Kang or what threat he represented. There were also FIVE unrelated properties between Loki and Spider-Man making it easy to forget Kang was even a thing, assuming people even caught the Disney+ show in the first place.

Moon Knight - 3/30/22 (unrelated)
Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness - 5/6/2022

A direct follow on what was done with Spider-Man, 5 months later, again, no reference to Kang.

Ms. Marvel - 6/8/22 (unrelated)
Thor: Love and Thunder - 7/8/22 (unrelated)
She-Hulk - 8/18/22 (unrelated)
Werewolf By Night - 10/7/22 (unrelated)
Wakanda Forever - 11/11/22 (unrelated)
Guardians Holiday Special - 11/25/22 (unrelated)

Phase 5:
Quantumania - 2/17/23

First film in Phase 5 makes it clear (finally) that Kang is the next big bad, almost 2 years after the character was introduced in a TV show, but it's not the years that were the problem...

It was the hours of unrelated content spread across 11 movies and TV shows, 14 if you count What If, Spider-Man and Doctor Strange hitting the multiverse angle but failing to mention Kang.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 - 5/5/23 (unrelated)
Secret Invasion - 6/21/23 (unrelated)
Loki Season 2 - 10/5/23
Marvels - 11/10/23 (unrelated)

And here we are... ~~I haven't actually seen Marvels yet, so I don't know how it fits in to the overall plot.~~ Alternate universe hole. No Kang. I've heard rumors of an X-Men stinger similar to what they did with Xavier and Reed Richards in Doctor Strange.

2 and a half years of churning out unrelated properties after having three phases of tightly integrated continuity is NOT how you keep your existing audience.

So all of that being point 1.

Point 2 is this... In the comics nobody really cared about Carol Danvers. She didn't become interesting until the modern Captain Marvel reboot in 2012. In fact, they replaced her a couple of times. Before that, her major story arc was getting her powers stolen by Rogue who would later join the X-Men using both her own power stealing mutant abilities and Carol's flight, invulnerability and super strength.

I'm a fan of Alan Moore's comments on superhero media's relation to fascism. Quoted bit below:

And he now looks with dismay on the way the superhero genre in which he once worked has eaten the culture. “Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys – of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing.

The relevant bit in bold:

He thinks that’s not just infantile but dangerous. “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” He points out that when Trump was elected in 2016, and “when we ourselves took a bit of a strange detour in our politics”, many of the biggest films were superhero movies.

Maybe because they basically keep making the same movie over and over again. Stop beating the horse.