The Inevitiable Death of The Marvel Cinematic Universe | The Marvels - Review
Has Marvel Just Hit The Last Nail In Their Coffin?
The latest feature-length film from Marvel Studios is the continuation of the story of Carol Danvers otherwise known as Captain Marvel. Reclaiming her identity from the tyrannical Kree in the first film, Captain Marvel takes revenge on the Supreme Intelligence with unintended consequences. When her duties send her to an anomalous wormhole linked to a Kree revolutionary, her powers become entangled with two other superheroes; Captain Monica Rambeau, Carol’s now fully grown superpowered niece, and Ms. Marvel a jersey-dwelling teenager with her own superpowers plus an unhealthy obsession with our title character. Three leads should be a no-brainer after the success of Marvel’s Avengers films yet there is something about The Marvels choice to make this a team film that leaves it feeling a little underbaked. But we’ll get to that.
Watch our full breakdown of the film below
You may have heard already but The Marvels is Marvel Studios' worst-performing film at the box office since they started making movies. There are a few reasons being hypothesized across the internet and the quality of the film itself is one of them, yet I feel it isn’t this film alone that has contributed to its poor performance. There is a general consensus that the quality of Marvel properties has declined, since Endgame with audiences becoming a little worn out on this type of content. With the success of films like Oppenheimer and Barbie in the cinemas it's clear Marvel no longer has the pulling power they used to. But why is that?
I think one reason could be that their content is now spread too thin across the ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). I’m going to speak about The Marvels in this review as a sequel to Captain Marvel but the truth is it's just another cog in the machine that is the entirety of the MCU. Gone are the days when each superhero standalone film had its own tone and style, everything is just one large conglomerate now with the same feeling, the same glossy finish, and risks are seemingly discouraged. This is actually to Marvel/Disney’s detriment. The average person just looking for a fun superhero film is very put off by the endless barrage of properties in terms of TV shows, sequels, spin-offs, etc none of which have held the same relevance for non-diehard fans since Avengers: Endgame. In fact, in this ABC article [1] they tally up the hours of content one would have needed to see in order to have the full backstory of the three leads in The Marvels and it comes out to nearly 16 hours. And that’s just the leads.
I’d obviously seen the first Captain Marvel film and I’d watched WandaVision as well, the Disney+ exclusive show that sets up Monica Rambeau’s character, but I had not seen Ms Marvel, so it still felt a little like I’d missed something, particularly for the first half hour or so of the film. As I’ve been saying the expansiveness of the MCU has now left each property feeling a little hollow. What once would’ve been fun little nods to the diehard fans now engulf the entirety of the franchise and if you haven’t caught up on everything you will feel a little out of the loop. To the film’s credit, The Marvels does give you a little backstory for context at the start of the film, the cliff-notes of previous relevant events if you will, but this still doesn’t translate into the characters themselves feeling fully fleshed out, and, again I struggled to be invested for that first half hour. Part of this feeling as well for me is that in this new era of Marvel, character arc appears to be lesser to the “lore”. Setting up how this film is going to connect to other properties in the MCU and which new characters comic book fans will be excited to see on screen felt like the priority of The Marvels rather than telling a good story about the characters in the film we were watching.
Another potential reason why the box office performance was so poor for The Marvels includes the recent SAG-AFTRS & Writers Guild strikes which included a condition of not promoting any film properties during the time of the strike. This left The Marvels with a very short window of promotion once the strikes ceased and after seeing the massive impact good marketing can have for getting bums in seats at the cinema from films like Barbie and Oppenheimer it’s clear that without a good marketing strategy, the film was going to struggle to have that many people show up. But to this point, I remember a time when Marvel didn’t even need marketing because people would just go and see the next Marvel film regardless of what it was about. I think Marvel and Disney have severely underestimated how much the average moviegoer contributed to the box office success of films like Avengers Endgame and if they keep excluding that audience with their convoluted universe, they won’t see the returns that they used to.
When Captain Marvel released, it was the first Marvel film that centered around a female lead and the first to have a woman in the director's chair; albeit as a co-director. The Marvels also dictates another first as director Nia Dacosta is the youngest and first black woman to helm a Marvel feature film however, I feel the poignancy of Captain Marvel was not reciprocated in its follow-up. At the time in 2019, my enjoyment of Captain Marvel was seemingly controversial as was the feminist messaging of Carol Danvers storyline as told by directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. I got into a few heated debates with specifically men online about the film with much of the criticism being centered around an intense dislike for Brie Larson. A dislike that has incomprehensibly continued to this day and may also be another reason for the film’s poor box office performance. To me, the film’s themes and Carol’s journey as a character was so strong in her standalone addition whereas The Marvel’s seemed to lack any of that prior conviction. I’m not saying that as a person of colour Nia Dacosta had the responsibility of giving us a film with social justice messaging in it, but I also don’t think she should’ve been given this bland nothing of a storyline to work with. The lackluster nature of the story for me detracts from the significance of having her as director of a franchise as huge as Marvel. And Nia Dacosta is super talented so it just seems like a waste.
Despite the average critical reviews (62% Rotten Tomatoes), The Marvels does seem to be tracking well with audiences (83% Rotten Tomatoes) and my partners' extremely positive reaction to the film demonstrated that for me, as I unsurprisingly agreed with a lot of critic opinions. It certainly isn’t the worst Marvel movie I’ve ever seen...I think Thor: Love & Thunder is currently sitting in THAT position. However, despite the great action sequences, some well-executed comedic moments, and the three leads giving strong performances as their respective heroes I couldn’t help but feel like the film never reached its full potential. The cast playing Kamala’s family was a little flat in their performances for me and Samuel L Jackson is just there at this point; the chemistry formed between him and Larson in the first film completely sucked dry in this sequel. And yes, not all films need to be art pieces, this can just be a form of light entertainment and I think it does achieve that goal, but it felt like The Marvels could’ve been so much more which is why I’m disappointed by what we got.
If you are still on the Marvel train, then I think you will have a good time with this film. It’s still very action-packed and still has the silly humor we’ve come to recognise from Marvel, but if you are looking for something more in your cinematic experience then The Marvels is not going to give that to you.
REFERENCES
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-13/the-marvels-poor-performance-at-the-box-office/103098824
[2] https://www.axios.com/2023/02/18/marvel-cinematic-universe-directors-diversity
[3] https://ew.com/movies/we-need-to-talk-marvels-women-problem/